2025 Monica P. Moore Lecture: The Invention of Race: Security, Interiority, Population with Dr. Leerom Medevoi

Join us as this lecture revisits longstanding questions about the origins of race as a sociopolitical category and a technology of power in order to suggest that conceptions of interiority have been just as important to the production of race as the much more widely acknowledged roles of corporeality and embodiment. The lecture explores how race finds its origins in a political discourse of threat served to securitize populations. By exploring the conditions of possibility for these political themes in the early modern Iberian peninsula and in the birth of colonial power in the Americas, the lecture seeks to establish the close historical and political relationships between color line racism, Islamophobia, and anti-semitism. 

Lee Medevoi is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Graduate Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He is the author of Rebels (Duke 2005) and The Inner Life of Race (Duke 2024), and his work on global American Studies, biopolitics, critical race theory, and environmental humanities has appeared in journals such as Cultural Critique, the American Literary History, and Social Text. He will be a 2025-2026 fellow at Central European University.