Mira Assaf Kafantaris and Jennifer Higginbotham on royalty, race and gender

Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Butler University) talks to her mentor, friend, and collaborator Jennifer Higginbotham (The Ohio State University) about the politics of racialization and the embodied threat of foreign ruling women in the early modern period. They discuss how early moderns grappled with the racialized presence of foreign queens and how they became loci of competing ideologies. Finally, Assaf Kafantaris and Higginbotham reflect on the conversation surrounding Meghan Markle’s marriage into the British royal family, which sparked transatlantic, even global, conversations about race, nation, belonging, and reproduction.