This panel focuses on constructions of race in non-dramatic seventeenth-century British literature, an important period for the rise of modern notions of epidermal race. In particular, it considers the ways that poems, ballads, maps, and experimental writing incorporated discourses of embodied color, affect, and epistemology that contribute to the history of race-making. Whereas most of the critical attention to constructions of race in early modern literature has focused on popular drama, this panel makes a new and vital contribution to the field by examining non-dramatic materials. These materials range from the canonical texts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to maps and ballads, to Robert Boyle’s experimental writings. This panel also considers constructions of race in the diverse contexts of colonialism, scientific writing, and theology. The speakers also represent a diverse range of scholars at difference career stages and ranks that include PhD student, assistant teaching professor, and full professor—all of whom are currently working on substantial studies involving race and non-dramatic early modern literature. The panel will consist of three papers that will each be twenty-minutes in length, which will leave ample time for unstructured discussion. The first paper, by Robin Hizme, PhD candidate and Director of College Preparatory Programs at Queens College, CUNY, will focus on the depiction of indigenous communities in John Smith’s writings as well as on maps, broadside ballads, and poems from both before and after the events of 1619 and 1623. This paper aims to explore how the introduction of African slaves to the colony in 1619 and the Virginia massacre of 1623 impacted the racialized descriptions of native customs and peoples. The second paper, given by Mario DiGangi, Professor of English at Lehman College, examines an affective epistemology of race operating in Shakespeare’s Sonnets that subjects even the most privileged whiteness to an injurious process of race-making. DiGangi explores race-making as an intersubjective process that can be tracked through the speaker’s shifting relations to the sequence’s “fair” youth, arguing that affective epistemology is a concept that forges connections between early modern race and sexuality studies. The third paper, by Alex Solomon, Assistant Teaching Professor at Rutgers University, examines representations of the fate of bodies after death and the effects of death on skin color in late seventeenth-century scientific and experimental writings. This paper shows how experimental and theological writings produce different accounts of the “accident” of skin color, counterintuitively locating intransigent racial identities in the instability of color. While these papers span different genres and dates over the course of the seventeenth century, they speak to one another in productive ways by focusing on ways that constructions of race are linked to embodiment. They reveal a history of internal and external racial logics that are quite distinct from modern understandings of race. At the same time, the histories of race embedded in the seventeenth-century texts examined by this panel help to illuminate the contradictions, inconsistencies, and fluidity that continue to characterize the operations of race in today’s world. Following the three papers, the presider will invite questions and comments from the audience.