marina@unc.edu
Other Fields: African Diaspora, Race Relations
Advisers: Konrad H.Jarausch and Karen Hagemann
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005 (Germanic Languages)
M.A. Thesis: “Autobiographical Voyages: The German Black Atlantic”
Research Interests
My research and teaching interests include modern European, women’s and gender history, the African Diaspora and race relations.
My dissertation project, “’Outsiders Within’: Afro-Germans in West Germany—Discourses, Perceptions and Experiences, 1949–1989,” 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 different groups of Germans into West German society.