A. Vice President (2 yrs)

Eric Langenbacher is a faculty member in the Department of Government, Georgetown University, where he completed his PhD in
2002, as well as Director of the Society, Culture, and Politics Program at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, DC, and Managing Editor of German Politics and Society (since 2005). He was a member of the GSA Board from 2016-2018, the Program Committee (2019, 2020), and, currently, the Berlin Program’s selection committee. Recent scholarship includes The German Polity, “Disinformation in Memory Politics and Anti-Democratic Movements,” and A Zeitenwende Indeed: The 2021 Bundestag Election and its Consequences. In the turbulent 21st century, the GSA’s mission—to foster multi-disciplinary scholarship on German-speaking Europe—remains vitally relevant, also because of unprecedented attacks on higher education and specific disciplines. The next president should work with our dedicated colleagues to stabilize and rebuild the association’s activities, stepping up fundraising to keep costs down and increase financial support for junior, underpaid, and remote colleagues. Seizing the post-pandemic moment, the president should also lead a process of reflection so that the association can benefit from lessons learned. We might envision a slightly scaled-down in-person conference, buttressed with hybrid or on-line components, and rethink conference locations.

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.