S. Marina Jones

Ph.D. Student

marina@unc.edu

Major Field: Modern European/Women's and Gender History

Other Fields: African Diaspora, Race Relations

Advisor: Konrad Jarausch; co-advisor: Karen Hagemann

Bio: S. Marina Jones is a Ph.D. candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill. She finished her M.A. in Translation in 2001 at Kent State University. In 2005, she completed her M.A. in Germanic Languages in 2005 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a thesis titled "Voyages: The German Black Atlantic". She has received an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School for the Fall 2008 semester. Her research and teaching interests include modern European, women's and gender history, the African Diaspora and race relations.

Abstract to the Dissertation Project: “'Outsiders Within': Afro-Germans in West Germany – Discourses, Perceptions and Experiences, 1949 – 1989"

This dissertation project analyzes the West German discourses of Afro-Germans in print media and the Afro-German experiences and perceptions of these discourses between 1949 and 1989. The following four main groups of primary sources are used: documents of the government and the political parties, print media (newspapers, political journals and illustrated magazines) of a broad political spectrum, Afro-German autobiographies and up to thirty oral history interviews with Afro-German men and women of three different age cohorts (born between 1945 and 1955, 1955 and 1965, 1965 and 1975).
The project makes a contribution to the emerging field of Black German and European Studies by contrasting the discussions of a mainly “white” German society with the Afro-German perspective. It maps the path to changing notions of German identity and to the integration of racially different groups of Germans into West German society.