A Debate About White Supremacy and Medieval Studies Exposes Deep Rifts in the Field

Medieval-studies scholars who have been calling on their field to diversify and confront white supremacists’ use of rhetoric, slogans, and symbols from that time period have felt a sense of urgency since last month’s violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va.

Now their efforts, and the response to them, are exposing rifts within the field. In a blog post last week, Rachel Fulton Brown, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, blasted the scholars worried about the field’s association with white supremacy, saying those advocates for diversity misunderstand their own discipline. Ms. Brown has support from the controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, who magnified her position in a post of his own.

On the other side of the debate is Dorothy Kim, an assistant professor of English at Vassar College and a medievalist who has been one of the fiercest critics of the field. In an August post on the blog In the Medieval Middle, she asked her fellow scholars to acknowledge that the discipline had been co-opted by white supremacists and urged change.

Scholars in the field say the debate that has emerged online is much more than petty academic bickering. It is a struggle over how a discipline will be defined. And the heated rhetoric, they add, has blurred the line between academic debate and harassment, leading professors on both sides to cite threats to their safety.

Hundreds of scholars have spoken up to defend Ms. Kim and decry the way a tenured professor has treated a more-junior colleague in the field. They signed a letter asking the University of Chicago’s history department to acknowledge its “responsibility to protect vulnerable colleagues,” while several medieval-studies organizations have issued statements supporting inclusiveness in their field.

Weaponizing the Past

“Today, medievalists have to understand that the public and our students will see us as potential white supremacists or white supremacist sympathizers because we are medievalists,” Ms. Kim wrote in her post. “The medieval western European Christian past is being weaponized by white supremacist/white nationalist/KKK/Nazi extremist groups who also frequently happen to be college students.”

To many in the field, she was articulating an argument that has been gaining traction among some scholars in the discipline. White supremacists, these scholars believe, have mistakenly glorified the era as a time of exuberant violence in the name of Christianity and the founding of “white culture.” The scholars want the discipline to acknowledge that issue and strive to be more diverse and inclusive.

“A lot of us find ourselves perpetually challenged by our colleagues who say, Well medieval studies now has no problems with racism or anti-Semitism, that’s of the past,” said Jeffrey J. Cohen, director of medieval studies at George Washington University. “It’s not.”

Early scholars in the field would be described as racist now, he said, but recently there has been a “rich, full, and diverse conversation going on about inclusivity in the Middle Ages.”

Ms. Brown disagrees that further changes are needed in her field. She believes that white supremacy is not a real threat and that the debate about its role in medieval studies does not acknowledge some of the diversity in the field and subject matter. She feels attacked by Ms. Kim, because the Vassar professor has written Facebook posts about her and her writing.

Ms. Brown expressed those views last week in a blog post challenging Ms. Kim’s views.

“She and her friends have persisted over the past year and a half in labeling me and many of my fellow medievalists as ‘white supremacists’ because it suits their narrative,” Ms. Brown wrote. “It is not a narrative that makes any sense if you know anything about our field.”

She concluded with a profane directive that Ms. Kim’s defenders objected to in their letter to Chicago’s history department. Ms. Brown said she intended the post to be lighthearted and did not mean for the ending to be directed at Ms. Kim.

The next day, Mr. Yiannopoulos summarized Ms. Brown’s post on his own blog. Ms. Kim has since received threatening emails, according to the open letter to the University of Chicago history department. She wrote in an email to The Chronicle that since the post on Mr. Yiannopoulos’s blog she does not feel safe.

“It basically means that I, my college, my family must be on alert at all times to potential violent threats that may come my way,” she wrote.

Ms. Kim was not available for an interview on Monday, but in a recent piece for the Society for Classical Studies, she wrote that she and her family have been preparing for online attacks as a result of her work. Many of the attacks have come from academics within the field of medieval studies, she said.

“These academic forms of harassment, doxxing, and other violent online tactics have come from young men in medieval studies — graduate students and early career,” she wrote. “They literally are mimicking the tactics and stances of their #gamergate and white supremacist online counterparts in regards to (1) the need for inclusiveness in medieval studies and (2) any discussion of race, sexuality, disability, gender as central to our work as medievalists.”

Marginalizing Scholars

Ms. Brown has emerged as one of the only professors to publicly support Mr. Yiannopoulos and has defended him on her blog, Fencing Bear at Prayer. She said she has watched many of his talks and feels he is an important voice in the continuing debate about freedom of speech.

Mr. Cohen, a contributor to In the Medieval Middle, signed a letter along with five other contributors in support of Ms. Kim. Ms. Brown’s post came right at a time, he said, when he felt progress was being made in the effort to address what he and others see as some of their field’s failings.

“Taken in isolation, it seems harmless and misguided,” he said. “But when it’s part of a wider conversation about the contours of the field, that’s when you see it doing work that can marginalize scholars.”

Ms. Brown said that she did not mean to harm Ms. Kim. White supremacists gain traction, she added, when people respond to them.

“If we keep telling ourselves to be afraid, it ratchets up,” she said. “Then people start getting hurt.”

Since her post, the International Society for the Study of Medievalism has issued a statement declaring its “collective resolve to counteract racism and white supremacism in all its forms and to defend the rights of contingent and untenured faculty.”

On Monday, the Medieval Academy Blog recirculated its values statement, which affirms “the right of students and junior faculty to receive supportive, professional mentoring that respects their intellectual freedom and personal integrity.”

Ms. Brown said she felt her opinion was shared by others, including some who may be afraid to express it because they are not tenured or at an institution like the University of Chicago, which has made strong statements about free speech.

To Ms. Brown, who said she has also received death threats, the episode is a matter of academics misunderstanding each other.

“The frames that we are using to interpret reality are completely different,” she said. It’s an argument, she said, for why these kinds of debates need to happen.

To Mr. Cohen, the incident has shown that while there is more work to be done, the field wants the change that he envisions.

“People did react very swiftly,” he said. “I think that was an affirmation to many medievalists about what they want the field to be.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.