What does it mean to teach German studies “in the wake”? Drawing upon Christina Sharpe’s crucial work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Adrienne Merritt explores how wake work as consciousness reaches across “the ruptures in time, space, history, and method” to commune with the “ghosts” of German studies and, in particular, Germanness as whiteness. Dr. Merritt highlights the ways in which German studies read through the lens of Black studies has the ability to speak to the temporal ruptures and historical silences that exist within the field, shifting how German studies can be experienced and taught in its wake. Using a recent course as an example, Dr. Merritt argues that wake work in/as German studies is more than a question of content or pedagogical method, but rather a way of being and creating community that unbinds the restrictive inclinations of academic disciplines, as well as the confines of time and space in the German studies classroom.

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Adrienne Merritt is an Assistant Professor in German at University of Colorado Boulder whose research and teaching interests range broadly from late medieval beguine mysticism to Afro- and Black German hip hop, poetry, and activism, including the question of identity and ways in which marginalized identities shed light on broader concepts of home, modernity, and belonging. Her work is interdisciplinary—focusing on historical and philological methodologies as well as sociology and cultural anthropology—and crosses linguistic and modern national borders.

Part of the Transcultural Approaches to Europe project. Learn more at https://simpsoncenter.org/projects/colloquium-transcultural-approaches-europe