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To: ForYourChildren
There are a lot of women medievalists in the US. I have the 2015 program from the Kalamazoo conference and just looked at one page of the list of program participants--male and female names were almost 50-50 (ignoring the ambiguous names).

Getting racial "diversity" is harder when a lot of programs are going to require proficiency in Latin (and sometimes in Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Old French, or some other difficult language), and when a lot of black students are not interested in European history (and the amount we know about medieval Africa is vastly less than about medieval Europe).

I don't mean to say that black students are unable to learn Latin--of course many can and do--but if they are aiming at a "quick fix" to improve the statistics, any hard requirements are going to be obstacles.

8 posted on 08/16/2017 10:05:25 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus

Wasn’t the richest person in world history a medieval African king?


9 posted on 08/16/2017 10:09:19 AM PDT by nickcarraway
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To: Verginius Rufus

It would probably be considered Islamophobic to teach that Muslims made a killing in the slave trade of Black Africans

It would be doubly out of sorts because it sometimes seems that many midievalists are outright Islamophiles.


10 posted on 08/16/2017 10:16:25 AM PDT by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
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To: Verginius Rufus

The amount we know about medieval African is sufficient.
They were born into a tribe, they murdered and ate everybody in the other tribe.
In turn they were murdered and eaten by the another tribe.
They are still using the same system today.


14 posted on 08/16/2017 7:06:56 PM PDT by 5th MEB (Progressives in the open; --- FIRE FOR EFFECT!!)
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To: Verginius Rufus

And a lot of those paper sessions at Kalamazoo are dedicated to “Queer” topics: homosexuality, sodomy, gay, lesbian - whatever the catch word might be.

One of the most celebrated (not necessarily in a good way) paper sessions (or maybe it was the specific paper title since it was published as an article later) at Kalamazoo years ago was called “Jousting without a Lance” which was about lesbian “homoeroticism”. We laughed about that title FOR YEARS AND YEARS.


16 posted on 08/16/2017 9:00:00 PM PDT by vladimir998 (Apparently I'm still living in your head rent free. At least now it isn't empty.)
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To: Verginius Rufus
There are a lot of women medievalists in the US.

There certainly are. It's a lot closer to parity than some of the STEM fields, for example. I question whether such a thing is even important. The identitarian assumptions of which the Left is so fond insist that what is thought is inextricably linked with who is thinking it, but place a text whose authorship is unknown in front of them and they can't tell if it was a man or a woman, black, white, or otherwise, unless the author states it. It really just doesn't matter that much.

23 posted on 05/17/2019 11:02:24 AM PDT by Billthedrill
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