Damani J. Partridge

Candidate statement

DAMANI J. PARTRIDGE (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2003) is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies and a German Department affiliate at the University of Michigan. His writing examines non-citizenship, sexuality, post-Cold War ‘freedom’, Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, ‘Blackness’ and embodiment, and the Obama moment in Berlin. He directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Berlin and Detroit. In 2012, he published Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany. UC Press will publish Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin this fall. His funders include the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Research Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the School for Advanced Research, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. For the GSA, he has regularly co-organized seminars, panels, conducted public interviews, and a special webinar on Holocaust Memory, Coloniality, and Black Lives. Having completed his term on GSA’s Board, he serves on its Committee for Institutional Transformation and Social Justice. He plans to continue work towards making the GSA into an organization in which a diverse set of members will systematically thrive.