Critical Race Conversations: Cultivating an Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College. Her research focuses on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern Mediterranean and race and religion in early modern English drama. She investigates the various discourses that construct and reinforce human difference and how they are mobilized in the global imperial projects that characterize much of the early modern period. Dadabhoy’s work also seeks to bridge the past to the present to illustrate how early modern racial and religious discourses and their prejudices manifest in our own contemporary moment. Dadabhoy has written several articles on teaching race, including “The Moor of America: Approaching the Crisis of Race and Religion in the Renaissance and the Twenty-First Century,” and the forthcoming articles “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in) Shakespeare,” in Postmedieval, and “Skin in the Game: Teaching Race in Early Modern Literature” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching.

Dr. Nedda Mehdizadeh teaches in Writing Programs at UCLA. Her research and pedagogical interests center on early modern transnational encounter, particularly between Persia’s Safavid natives and their English visitors, as well as Shakespeare, Critical Race Studies, and Critical Diversity Studies. Her composition courses focus on critical diversity and critical race instruction, and she trains graduate student teachers in anti-racist and inclusive classroom design and practice in her graduate seminar, “Diversity and Student-Centered Pedagogy,” for the program’s Certificate in Writing Pedagogy. She likewise designs and facilitates anti-racist and inclusive pedagogy workshops for UCLA Writing Programs’ faculty and graduate students, more broadly. She has won fellowships through UCLA’s Mellon-funded EPIC program which gives educators the opportunity to develop inclusive curriculum. Her most recent article, “Othello in Harlem: Transforming Theater in Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet,” was inspired by conversations she had with her students during her undergraduate course, “Global Othellos.”