This fall, Illinois will welcome Keidrick Roy, an assistant professor of Government at Dartmouth College and author of American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (Princeton, 2024), a study of how medieval legacies of feudalism haunt liberal democracy in the United States. To date, this important book has received the Best Book in American Political Thought Award (American Political Science Association) and the Best Book in Intellectual History Prize (Society for U.S. Intellectual History), among others.
Medievalists around the world have become increasingly aware of how deeply the intellectual and political roots of our field are entwined with modern colonial projects, emerging racial categories, and narratives of American exceptionalism and white nationalism: what Professor Roy has termed racial feudalism. This was the language and set of ideas shared by abolitionists and proslavery thinkers alike, in the antebellum period, to interpret what they saw as the remnants of the medieval world that persisted in American color-based hierarchies. The necessity of critiquing racial feudalism then inspired generations of Black intellectuals into the twentieth century. Understanding this topic's renewed relevance today is of crucial importance, not only for scholars of medievalism and the medieval past, but for all Americans and anyone committed to the ideals of liberal democracy now and in the future.
So mark you calendars for this important public lecture and the festive reception to follow at the Levis Faculty Center on Thursday, September 10th at 5:00pm.