In this session, Cailin Flannery Roles will discuss the Women Writers Project's new, internally-funded collaborative project, which asks whether and how digital collections of historical texts can represent racial identity. Building on the work of scholars like Kim Hall (1995), Marisa Fuentes (2016), Brigitte Fielder (2020), and Jessica Marie Johnson (2020), the project addresses race not as a stable quality of difference but as a social category with shifting boundaries and culturally specific descriptors. Rather than simply marking the presence of women of color, a practice that reifies whiteness as the unmarked norm, this project seeks to make visible both early modern categories of race and the process of archival categorization by considering race as a critical framework for understanding early women’s writing. Cailin will provide an overview of the project and its emerging encoding methods, using Claire de Duras’ Ourika to demonstrate the complexities of formalizing information about race.

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