Books by Kimberly Anne Coles

Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics and justified English colonial domination.

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.