Dadabhoy Supports Peers to Engage Students in Classroom Conversations on Race

In her literature courses at Harvey Mudd College, Professor Ambereen Dadabhoy and her students use discussions about race and race-making as tools for studying the past, via histories, cultures and literature, to better understand the present.  

Dadabhoy recently participated in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ online teaching resource Throughlines, which was created to support educators in bringing these conversations into their classrooms and to offer new ways of engaging students in discussions of race and its nascent forms.

In a short video, Islam and the West, Dadabhoy shares how she guides her students through early modern texts that reveal the relationship between Christian Europe and Muslim culture. This exercise helps students understand ways the Western world’s perception of Muslims has been shaped over centuries and how these perceptions continue to inform contemporary ideas. 

As a scholar of early modern literature, Dadabhoy pairs English plays from the period with extracts of early modern travel narratives. She frequently assigns excerpts from Leo Africanus’s Geographical History of Africa and Richard Knolles’s General History of the Turks alongside English drama. “This methodology allows my students to see the construction of difference between Western culture and Muslims,” she says. By first engaging with the plays and then examining historical documents, students gain a deeper understanding of how these texts shaped Western attitudes toward Islam.

Through these explorations and discussions, Dadabhoy asks students to question whether the portrayals of Muslims in early modern texts echo contemporary ideas. “Often, students can point to the same rhetoric of prejudice and bigotry that we encounter in the Western world in the 21st century,” she says. However, she also emphasizes that the narrative of inevitable conflict between Muslims and Christians obscures the positive. “This narrative hides a history that includes collaboration, coexistence and exchange,” she says.