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The Dante Society is our group for graduate students and anybody beyond college interested in fostering the Christian intellectual life in Pittsburgh. This spring, we’re continuing our “Podcasts and Picklebacks” series. We will preview an episode of the new Genealogies of Modernity Podcast and then discuss. The podcast’s main host and Beatrice Institute Senior Research Fellow Ryan McDermott will lead the discussions. Please fill out this form to RSVP!

Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread—and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings—featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes—to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating these paintings in the present, when the paintings’ insidious ideologies have been debunked, but when mixed-race viewers also appreciate images that testify to their presence in the past.