The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley Peters and White Christianity

Kim Coles is Professor of English, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Classics at the University of Maryland. Her current book, Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, just appeared from the University of Pennsylvania Press.The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor is about how these concerns converge around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination.

Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. This talk will draw from her current work on race, religion, and gender in the early modern Transatlantic, with specific reference to Phillis Wheatley Peters and White Christianity. The event forms part of the year-long series of events by UGA and TCU to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Phillis Wheatley Peters' Poems.