Congratulations to Professor Emanuel Rota (FRIT & EUC) and the transatlantic team of researchers associated with the project “Understanding Narratives of Racialization in the Mediterranean” for their grant from the Embassy of France!

This grant has been awarded through the France@Illinois Center of Excellence, one of twenty-two Centers of Excellence sponsored by the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the United States. These Centers support interdisciplinary activities, including conferences and workshops, job fairs, film series, lectures by distinguished scholars, writers, and artists, and cultural exchanges.

Professor Rota and his team’s “Understanding Narratives of Racialization in the Mediterranean” research project examines how race as a cultural construction contributes to social marginalization in the premodern and postmodern Mediterranean. With the recent polemics on the impact of American theories on racism in French and European society, they aim to increase transatlantic collaboration on this topic by researching contextually specific histories of racism. From manuscript illuminations to video games, their goal is to collect sources from Mediterranean cultural traditions on processes of racialization from a multinational perspective.