W. E. B. Du Bois in Germany: Seeing Blackness in Berlin’s Museums (Faculty Colloquium)

W. E. B. Du Bois’s graduate studies in Berlin in the 1890s were an empowering experience for him not only for the cutting-edge academic training he received and the dramatically different social practices he encountered, but also in light of his keen interest in visual art. In 1926, a politically very changed Du Bois returned to Berlin for the first time in decades, and the same museums that had once represented the heights of European culture to him he now served to offer glimpses into the long-standing presence of Blackness in world culture. Against the biographical backdrop of these two visits in Berlin, this talk reconstructs the available art-historical evidence of his radical pan-Africanist rethinking of world culture.

Speaker:
Michael Saman is a scholar of German intellectual history, and is currently preparing a book on classical German thought in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. In addition to Bard, he has taught for colleges and universities including Dartmouth, NYU, Princeton, UCLA, Brown, and William & Mary. Dr. Saman’s research has appeared in journals such as the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte and the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, and he is co-editor of the Forum “Race, Imperialism, and the Age of Goethe,” which recently appeared in the Goethe Yearbook.

Part of the Fall 2024 Faculty Colloquium series.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: SR 8 (P24)

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