Cord J. Whitaker is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Wellesley College. After receiving his BA from Yale College (SM ’01), he completed a PhD in English at Duke, specializing in medieval literature, empire, and race. Whitaker has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, among others. Whitaker’s articles on medieval romance, religious conflict, and race have appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and the Yearbook of Langland Studies. He recently edited a special issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies titled “Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages.” The collection builds on the growing number of studies that ask whether race matters to the Middle Ages by focusing instead on how race matters. Whitaker is currently writing a book titled Black Metaphors: Race, Religion, and Rhetoric in the Literature of Late Medieval England, from which comes his presentation “Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and the Spiritual Side of Race.”