Assistant Professor of Medieval Studies and British & Irish Literary Studies, Nahir Otaño Gracia has recently been awarded the 2022 Article Prize for her article, Towards a decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd.
The Medieval Academy of America Article Prize in Critical Race Studies was established in 2020 to examine the significance of race in medieval studies. Annually, a winner is awarded for writing an article published in scholarly journal which explores questions of race and the medieval world.
Otaño Gracia says that her essay “demonstrates how scholarship on this topic has tried to downplay and erase these racist incidents which depicts the text as pre-racial. This model is important because it asks that we rethink the ways we study the Middle Ages. It asks that we retrain ourselves to study how power and dehumanization function in medieval texts. It also asks that we confront how so much of the work created by medievalists is compatible with the ideologies of white supremacists who often identify with an imagined warrior class such as the Vikings.”
Find out more about Otaño Gracia’s accomplishment through UNM Newsroom.
