Modern Europe Colloquium | Tiffany Florvil

Event time: 
Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

The Modern Europe Colloquium presents Tiffany Florvil, Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico, on “Rediscovering May Ayim”
Events will usually take place on Thursdays from 4-5:30 pm. The one exception to our Thursday meeting time will be Robin Mitchell’s book talk on Friday, October 29 from 12-1:30 pm. For zoom meeting link please subscribe to the European Studies Council email list: https://bit.ly/3C0OAmy
“Rediscovering May Ayim” In this paper, I discuss newly discovered sources that offer more contextualization about May Ayim’s life and I use those sources to draw connections to larger historical moments in Germany and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bio:
Professor Florvil is a historian of the modern and late modern period in Europe, especially social movements, gender and sexuality, emotions, and the African diaspora. Her manuscript, Both Black and German: Women and the Making of a Movement, is a cultural history of the interplay of emotions, social activism, transnational feminism, and the African/Black diaspora in Germany, in which she explores the emergence of the Black German movement of the 1980s and 1990s and traces the evolution of a Black German intellectual and activist tradition inspired by Caribbean-American feminist poet Audre Lorde. She has written several articles that revolve around the Black German movement and its transnational connections as well as gendered aspects of Black German activism. Together with Vanessa Plumly, Florvil has co-edited a volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories with Peter Lang Press (2018). Florvil has organized with Vanessa Plumly two German Studies Association (GSA) seminars: one entitled “Black German Studies Then and Now” in 2014 and another entitled “Political Activism in the Black European Diaspora: From Theory to Praxis” in 2015. She is the Co-Chair, along with Vanessa Plumly, Sara Lennox and Andrew Zimmerman, of the Black Diaspora Studies Network at the German Studies Association, in which she has organized numerous panels and roundtables. She was also the Co-Chair, along with Heikki Lempa and Derek Hillard, of the Emotion Network at the German Studies Association in 2017. She also is a digital humanist, serving as the Co-Founder, Network Editor, and Advisory Board Member for H-Black-Europe and a Co-Founder and Network Editor of H-Emotions. She blogs for Black Perspectives published by the African American Intellectual History Society and also is a part of the transnational group Black Central Europe. Hailing from South Florida, Professor Florvil joined the Department of History in 2013 as a historian of Comparative Women’s and Gender in Europe. Her areas of interest include race and ethnicity, gender, identity formation, social and cultural movements, black internationalism, intellectualism, diasporas, and emotions. Her familial connections to the Caribbean and experiences attending schools in Germany, Florida, Wisconsin, and the South as well as working at a research institution in London, England have informed her pedagogy, shaping how she works with diverse.

Tiffany Florvil, Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico