Noémie Ndiaye, Associate Professor of English and Romance Languages & Literatures, published her first monograph in September 2022. Since its publication, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race has earned numerous awards:
- 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association: For an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance
- 2023 Bevington Award from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society: For best new book
- 2023 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy: For historical or critical work on any subject connected with literature, written by a woman
- Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2023: For an early career scholar who has produced a first book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
Professor Ndiaye on her work:
"I show how performance culture helped strategically turn blackness into a racial category across early modern Western Europe, and I dissect the stagecraft used in early modern theater to represent and racialize Africans and Afro-descendants across borders in early modern England, France, and Spain. At the end of the sixteenth century, in a context of global expansion, the racial matrix produced a new paradigm: the word race started referring to phenotypical differences for which skin color quickly became a shorthand. Scripts of Blackness explores how that long-reaching epistemological shift was brought about, how it slowly infiltrated people’s everyday reading of human bodies, and how the racialization of blackness was absorbed into early modern European popular cultures."