Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Claiming Blackness in Germany
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures professor Sara Lennox will give the final lecture of this year's Distingushed Faculty Lecture Series.
Though people of African origin have lived in Germany for centuries, they have often been denied their right to consider themselves Germans. In the twentieth 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. Professor Lennox will describe what this means for both Germany and Europe, slow to embrace difference and quick to view Blacks as transient foreigners.
Professor Lennox, who joined the faculty in 1975, directs the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program and has been an adjunct professor of Comparative Literature since 1975. She has been an associated faculty member in Women's Studies since 1976; STPEC since 1977; and Labor Studies since 1999. Professor Lennox specializes in 20th century German literature, literary theory, comparative literature and women's studies.
Since 1981, she has served as director of the STPEC, 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.
Professor 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 assisting professor in the School of Humanities and Arts at Hampshire College in the fall of 1978.
Professor Lennox served on the editorial board of German Quarterly from 1998 to 2003; the Massachusetts Review since 1976; Women in German Yearbook from 1992 to 2000; German Studies Review from 1996-99, Signs from 1992-95; and Thought and Action from 2005 to the present. She was a contributing editor to New German Critique from 1973 to 2000 and on the international advisory board of Transit since 2006.
Professor 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.