Race, Religion and Difference in the Nineteenth Century

This interdisciplinary seminar programme explores how multiple discourses on race and religion intersected in the global nineteenth century, and generated, reinforced and/or challenged notions of human difference. How did nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism conjugate with opposition to antisemitism? In what ways were campaigns against the enslavement of Black people and Islamophobia mutually constitutive? These are the kinds of questions we seek to investigate, across different disciplines, geographies and media. Our discussion also aims to complicate our scholarly understanding of a number of working categories – nation and empire, barbarism and civilisation, domination and resistance – and is given added urgency by the pressures of the contemporary moment. The seminar series runs from October 2021 – June 2022. Details of the individual seminars can be found on the What’s On page.

This project is a collaboration between Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, University of London and the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies at Durham/Newcastle and Northumbria Universities (CNCS).

Project team: Ella Dzelzainis, Newcastle University; David Feldman, Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism; and Tom Stammers, Durham University.

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The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is the only centre in the UK, and one of only two centres in Europe, whose mission is to promote understanding of antisemitism.

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