UMass Amherst Professor Sara Lennox to Give Distinguished Faculty Lecture April 28

April 17, 2008

Contact:

Patrick J. Callahan 413/545-0444

AMHERST, Mass. – Sara Lennox, professor of languages, literatures and cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will give the fourth and final Distinguished Faculty Lecture of this year’s series on Monday, April 28 at 4 p.m. in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center. The talk is free and open to the public.

Lennox will give a talk titled, “Claiming Blackness in Germany.” She will discuss how people of African origin have lived in Germany for centuries, yet they have often been denied their right to consider themselves Germans. In the 20th century, Afro-Germans were given derogatory names like “Rhineland bastards” and “occupation babies.” But since 1986, Black Germans have created a vibrant community and identity in Germany by affirming their connections to the transnational African diaspora. Lennox will describe what this means for both Germany and Europe, slow to embrace difference and quick to view Blacks as transient foreigners.

Lennox joined the university in 1975 and is a professor of German languages and literatures and director of the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program. She has been an adjunct professor of comparative literature since 1975 and an associate faculty member in women’s studies since 1976, STPEC since 1977, and labor studies since 1999. Lennox specializes in 20th-century German literature, literary theory, comparative literature, and women’s studies.

She has served as director of the STPEC program since 1981. STPEC is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences that encourages students to engage in a critical examination of society and to develop their own capacities for critical reading, writing, and thinking. STPEC courses deal with issues such as freedom and the state, structural inequality in the economy, work and work relations, the relationship of Western to non-Western cultures, the interrelationship of racism, sexism and class oppression, the psychodynamics of politics, and theories of social change.

Lennox was a visiting associate professor in the German studies department at Stanford University in the winter-spring of 1983; a visiting lecturer in the German department at Smith College in 1980, and a visiting part-time assistant professor in the School of Humanities and Arts at Hampshire College in the fall of 1978. Lennox served on the editorial board of German Quarterly from 1998-03; the Massachusetts Review since 1976; Women in German Yearbook from 1992-00; German Studies Review from 1996-99, Signs from 1992-95, and Thought and Action, 2005-present. She was a contributing editor to New German Critique from 1973-00 and on the international advisory board of Transit from 2006-present.

Lennox earned a bachelor’s degree in German from DePauw University in 1965, a master’s degree in German in 1966 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1973 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

A reception follows each talk. Faculty members in the series receive a Chancellor’s Medal following their lecture. The Chancellor’s Medal is the highest honor bestowed on individuals for exemplary and extraordinary service to the campus. The lecture series is sponsored by the offices of the chancellor and the provost.

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