If you are interested in the work on Afro-Germans in the program, please look for the presentations by Sonya Donaldson and Vanessa Plumly. The Germanists will speak on the following panels:

Panel 4: Kinship and Family, Friday, March 17, 3:30-4:45 PM

Vanessa Plumly, Lecturer in German, State University of New York at New Paltz

“Minding the Relational Gap/s: White German “Omis” and the Complicated Bridging of Maternal, Racial, and Generational Divides in Afro-German Girlhood Narrations.”

Panel 6: Identities and Borders, Saturday March 18, 10:45 AM-12:00 PM

Sonya Donaldson, Assistant Professor of English, New Jersey City University

“Whose Little Girl Am I”: Fantasy and the Fantastic in (Re)constructing Black German Identity”

Sonya Donaldson is an assistant professor of World Literature in the English Department at New Jersey City University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she focused on Afro-German autobiographical narratives. Her book manuscript: Irreconcilable Differences?: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora, focuses on autobiographical narratives by Afro-European and African American writers and performers to examine the ways in which black artists, in engaging sites of shared memory (both real and imagined), construct diasporic spaces outside of the nation paradigm. She is currently working on a digital humanities project, “Singing the Nation into Being: National Anthems and the Politics of Black Female Performance,” which examines the ways in which black women’s public performances of “nation” critique raced and gendered notions of belonging. Donaldson is a recent recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship for Junior Faculty (2016-2017).

Vanessa D. Plumly is Lecturer and Program Coordinator of German in the department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures at SUNY New Paltz. She has published articles on surveillance in the German television series Tatort, the intersectionality of fear and violence in recent German historical contexts, and on the integration of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) and protest into the second-year German language curricula in the German Studies Review, Women in German (forthcoming in September), and Die Unterrichtspraxis. Plumly has two forthcoming chapters in edited volumes, focusing on research drawn from her dissertation, “BLACK-Red-Gold in der ‘bunten Republik’” in which she assessed the performance and discursive construction of the German concept of home (Heimat) in Black German cultural productions since the Wende (1989-90) period and for which she received a number of grants and fellowships. She is currently co-editing a volume on New Perspectives in Black German Studies with Tiffany Florvil.

Co-sponsored by the Center for German Studies (and many other centers, programs, departments and schools).

For more information on the conference please contact globalblackgirlhood@gmail.com.