Jamele Watkins researches the intersection of race and gender in the German speaking world. Her current book project, Roses for Angela (currently under review with a university press), focuses on East German transnational solidarity Angela Davis during her imprisonment. She has published on Black hair in Germany, Black German theater, and archives. As an assistant professor in German Studies at University of Minnesota, she joyfully teaches everything from the premodern to the present. She received her Ph.D. degree in German Studies from University of Massachusetts Amherst and thereafter received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University.
Ethelene Whitmire is a writer and professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Whitmire is the author of The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram and Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian. Her research has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Lois Roth Foundation, and American Scandinavian Foundation. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s from Rutgers University – New Brunswick and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.
Eliana Văgălău is an Associate Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago. Her research on francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary philosophy focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as on questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and sexuality. She has published articles on the work of authors such as Maryse Condé, James Noël, and Jean-Claude Charles, and has coedited a reader’s guide to the latter’s body of work (Liverpool University Press, 2022). As a founding member of the Collectif Jean-Claude Charles, she dedicates much of her work to making visible the work of this fundamental Haitian author.She has published translations of literary and philosophical texts and is currently completing an essay on contemporary French Caribbean fiction.
By teaching a course on Black Paris, her extensive collaborations with contemporary Black artists and writers living in France today, as well as serving as co-organizer of the Black Europe Symposium in 2023 at Loyola University Chicago, she has developed a secondary research interest in the city of Paris as a chief site of Black transnational encounters.
