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Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, republished in a new annotated edition, recounts Ika Hügel-Marshall’s experiences growing up as the daughter of a white German woman and an African-American man after World War II. As an «occupation baby», born in a small German town in 1947, Ika has a double stigma: Not only has she been born out of wedlock, but she is also Black. Although loved by her mother, Ika’s experiences with German society’s reaction to her skin color resonate with the insidiousness of racism, thus instilling in her a longing to meet her biological father. When she is seven, the state places her into a church-affiliated orphanage far away from where her mother, sister, and stepfather live. She is exposed to the scorn and cruelty of the nuns entrusted with her care. Despite the institutionalized racism, Ika overcomes these hurdles, and finally, when she is in her forties, she locates her father with the help of a good friend and discovers that she has a loving family in Chicago.

Shortlisted for the Anne Bloomfield Prize 2010
Across the ninety years of its history, the University of New Zealand (1871-1961) appointed four women professors to the academic staff. From the outset, while the ‘woman professor’ was an insider to the Academy based on her qualifications and professional credentials, on the basis of her gender she was a relative outsider to this deeply patriarchal institution. Accordingly, academic women, and in particular this first generation of women professors, were officially invisible both to their (male) colleagues and to the institution. This is not to suggest that the presence of a ‘woman professor’ was unproblematic or that she sat easily on the margins of men’s scholarly worlds. This book traces the personal and professional histories of each woman professor and examines their contribution to the expansion of higher education for women. On the basis of extensive archival research in New Zealand, England and the United States, the author uses Bourdieu’s notions of ‘habitus’, ‘field’ and ‘capital’ to analyse this intellectual community of women and the professionalisation of academic work. The book rehabilitates the ‘woman professor’ from the margins of historical scholarship and offers an insight into a forgotten aspect of the history of women’s higher education: the history of women and the professoriate.

Making Relationships: Gender in the Forming of Academic Community presents two case studies of student-teacher writing conferences to make visible what is usually invisible in academe: the «personal.» It shows that successful academic community may be most easily achieved by students and teachers who create relationships marked by masculine themes and values - and that this may be true even when the teacher is a feminist woman. If change is to occur, the author argues, compositionists must rethink both contemporary composition and gender theories and develop new ways of representing narrative and other expressive discourses.

The figure of the «Muslim» woman or girl performs a crucial role in far-reaching socio-political debates in Germany. Indeed, such figures challenge the boundaries of gender equality and secularism and contest notions of tolerance and integration. The (in)visibility of Muslim women’s bodies and their apparent position in Islam function as ostensible indicators of their oppression and of Islam’s supposed incompatibility with western values.

This book investigates representations of «Muslim» women and girls in German popular culture from 1990 to 2015. The study analyses the discursive function of such figures in German popular culture via three key research questions: what representational practices surround the figure of the Muslim woman or girl in German life writing, young adult literature and film? How do such representations function to produce «non-Muslim» subject positions? What is the function of this figure within narratives of feminism and assertions of gender equality? This study understands itself as an intervention into contemporary racist discourses in Germany and operates within a transdisciplinary framework of intersectional feminism and cultural and German studies. Ultimately, the book aims to make visible and interrogate
the underlying hierarchies and agendas that drive representations of Muslim women and girls.

This book was the winner of the of the 2017 Early Career Researcher Prize in German Studies, a collaboration between the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham and Peter Lang.

Dislocation, which involves moving from a familiar place to an unknown place, is a common experience in this era of globalization yet it can cause a deep sense of alienation – people feel invisible, voiceless, and anonymous. A Hermeneutic on Dislocation as Experience: Creating a Borderland, Constructing a Hybrid Identity employs socio-rhetorical criticism from a postcolonial perspective, providing a hermeneutic on the experience of dislocation from the perspective of Asian immigrant women. The author’s focus on Asian immigrant women’s spirituality is interwoven with different texts such as the story of a woman caught in adultery (Jn. 7: 53-8:11), Asian immigrant women’s stories in the novels Dictee and Crossings, and stories of Korean shamans encountered in the author’s ethnographic fieldwork.
This book suggests that people who experience dislocation can create a borderland where their own marginality gains power and voice. In that borderland, they are able to construct a hybrid identity as a result of deep engagement with one another. In particular, the author’s fieldwork on Korean shamans reveals how the shamanic ritual itself functions as a borderland, wherein the marginalized Korean shamans gain hybrid identity. A Hermeneutic on Dislocation as Experience is a valuable resource for classes in Asian studies, ethnography, cultural anthropology, biblical spirituality, women’s spirituality, and interdisciplinary courses.

Balzac’s Cane is an English translation of Delphine de Girardin’s 1836 novella, La Canne de M. de Balzac, which centers around a protagonist named Tancred Dorimont, a brilliant young man plagued by his devastating good looks. In a social context in which appearance is everything, it seems for several chapters that beauty will break, rather than make, this young man’s fortune. One evening as Tancred seeks to forget his problems by spending an evening at the opera, he observes M. de Balzac and learns the secret to this famous author’s ability to know the innermost secrets of all walks of life with such detail and intimacy; M. de Balzac’s cane, a famously hideous walking stick, has the power to render the bearer invisible. A deal, which straddles the line between a favor and blackmail, is worked out between these two men and the cane comes into Tancred’s possession. With this tool Tancred is able to overhear state secrets, make his fortune, and then set his sights upon finding a woman truly worthy of his love. Voyeurism, surveillance, courtship, feminism, authorship, and the vanishing distinction between public and private lives are all raised in this novella. This work will be a useful text in either French literature or comparative survey courses due to its examination of contemporary nineteenth-century life, social organization and morals, its parody of bildungsroman and romance novels, and its combination of genres: several lengthy poems are an essential part of the novella’s text.