Faculty Profiles
Lennox Assumes Presidency of German Studies Association
Sara Lennox, director of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program and professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, last month began a two-year term as president of the German Studies Association (GSA), a 1,600-member organization of North American and international scholars who focus on all aspects of German-speaking countries.
Lennox has been involved in GSA since 1984, when she attended the organization’s conference. She has since served on its nominating committee, a task force on curricular guidelines for German studies programs, the editorial board of German Studies Review and the GSA’s executive committee. Elected vice president in 2004, Lennox served two years before succeeding to the presidency. After she steps down, Lennox will serve two years on the executive committee as past-president.
“I think GSA is a wonderful organization,” says Lennox. “To my knowledge, it is the only area studies organization focused on Western Europe, and it has had a major impact on the study of national languages and literatures because it provides a forum where scholars trained in literary/cultural studies can keep abreast of the most current developments in the history, political science, sociology and other aspects of the German-speaking countries.”
In her experience, says Lennox, German cultural studies tend to be more interdisciplinary than its French, Spanish and British counterparts, a foundation she hopes to build on. “One of my ambitions as president is to encourage ever more interdisciplinary collaboration, that scholars from the various fields of the humanities and social sciences who deal with the German-speaking countries actually undertake collaborative work together.”
According to Lennox, who has taught at UMass Amherst since 1975 and led the interdisciplinary STPEC program since its inception in more than 25 years ago, the field of German studies is undergoing a shift towards transnational approaches, a trend she is eager to encourage. “Under the impact of globalization, migration, the expansion of the EU, and many other factors, we are now coming to an understanding that the borders of the national state have always been porous and that we cannot understand what has happened within a particular country without knowing how it has been impacted by pressures from without,” she says. “One dimension of that paradigm shift has been a new focus on the heterogeneity of populations of the German-speaking countries, on race, on colonialism, on migration, on German conceptions of whiteness.”
For several years, Lennox has been involved in collaborative projects on Afro-Germans and their role and impact in modern Germany and its culture. German studies is also expanding in the area of comparative relations, Lennox says, with a series of panels on German-Dutch relations and another on German-Polish relations planned for this year’s GSA conference.
In addition, Lennox says, discussions are taking place about what kinds of new methodologies are needed to think transnationally rather than nationally, and a number of roundtables and sessions at the GSA conference will address such questions. “I have a particular interest in trying to elaborate a post-Eurocentric perspective on Germany by drawing on scholarship that has emerged from non-European areas of the world.”
February 27, 2007
