Kimberly Coles

Kim Coles has written articles on the topics of race, women’s writing, gender, sexuality, and religious ideology. Her current book, Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, emerged from University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2022. The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor is about how these concerns converge around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. In addition to two monographs, Kim has also co-edited four essay collections and two special journal issues. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.