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Julia Roos

Associate Professor of History, Indiana University (USA)

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

August−December 2016

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»German Racial Regimes in a Transnational Context: An Afro-German Microhistory«

Project outline:

My current research focuses on the biography of an Afro-German woman who was the daughter of a Senegalese French soldier briefly stationed in the Rhineland after World War I. This woman, whom I call Erika Diekmann, spent the Nazi and early post-World War II years in a Lutheran school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem. She returned to West Germany in 1949, immigrated to the United States in 1957, and died there in 1963. The study, tentatively entitled German Racial Regimes in a Transnational Context: An Afro-German Microhistory, uses Erika’s life to examine broader questions of continuity and discontinuity in German racial discourse, as well as position German attitudes towards race more firmly within global and transnational frameworks. The biography of Erika Diekmann incorporates substantial portions of my work on the »black horror on the Rhine,« the 1920s propaganda campaign against colonial French occupation troops in the Rhineland. Thus far, the larger project has resulted in five published articles, and one forthcoming article; these publications will form the basis of four book chapters. (Julia Roos)

Research partner:

Julia Roos follows an invitation of Andreas Fahrmeir (Professor of Modern History at Goethe University). Her stay at the institute is supported by the History Programme of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaft, as well as by the Alfons und Gertrud Kassel-Foundation and the University's Cluster of Excellence »The Formation of Normative Orders«.

Scholarly profile of Julia Roos

Julia Roos received her PhD in History at the Carnegie Mellon University in 2001. The title of her thesis is Weimar’s Crisis Through the Lens of Gender: The Case of Prostitution. In 2002 she was awarded with the Fritz Stern Prize for the best dissertation submitted at a North American University. From 2002−2003 she was a visiting research fellow at the department of history at Princeton University and is since 2012 an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Homepage:
Please find more information about Julia Roos here.

Main areas of research:

Modern Europe; Twentieth-Century Germany; Social and Political History; Gender and Sexuality; Afro-German History; Propaganda.

Selected publications:

»An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling«, in: Central European History, Vol. 49, No. 2 (forthcoming 2016).
»Schwarze Schmach«, in: Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson (eds.), 1914−1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Berlin, 2015. (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10647)
»›Huns‹ and Other ›Barbarians‹: A Movie Ban and the Dilemmas of 1920s German Propaganda against Colonial French Troops«, in: Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2014), 67-91.
»Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Geschichte des Rassismus: Anregungen für die Erforschung der ›Rheinlandbastarde‹ aus einem privaten Briefwechsel«, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Vol. 29 (2013), 154-70.
»Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ›Occupation Children‹, 1920−1930«, in: Contemporary European History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2013).
Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman’s Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919−1933, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Julia Roos

Scholarly profile of Julia Roos

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