Guest lecturer, Roy Sorenson | Title of Lecture "Like a Sensational Newspaper Headline | The David Norton Memorial Lecture takes place once or twice a year and has a distinguished faculty member/guest speaker who will give a talk on philosophical or liberal studies disciplines | For more information about the lecture please email dbiddle@udel.edu or visit www.philosophy.udel.edu 

Guest speaker: Sharon Block | Title: “Creating Race on Early American Bodies” | Using 4,000 descriptions of missing persons, Block’s cultural history traces how common language called race and identity into being before the rise of nineteenth-century scientific racism. In the colonial eighteenth-century, a multitude of characteristics besides skin color reified racial assumptions. Colonists discursively justified a race-based slave system not by opposing black and white, but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described. Such subtle systemization of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life histories only for people of European heritage. Block’s rereading of the eighteenth-century racial landscape offers a fine-tuned analysis of evolving notions of racial difference. | Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, Africana Studies, Women’s Studies, English, History, the Vice Provost for Diversity, and the University Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events. Additional support provided by the History department’s Harrington Fund | For more information please visit http://www.history.udel.edu/