As part of the Shasha seminar, Andrew Curran, professor of romance languages and literatures, spoke on “Negotiating the Histories of Race” on April 8. He provided a broad assessment of several overlapping tendencies in European race theory. Beginning with an examination of the basic Judeo-Christian understanding of humankind’s origins, Curran discussed how a series of early-modern anatomical “discoveries” led thinkers to overlay a relatively fluid conception of “human varieties” with more rigid classification schemes.