On March 16, 2021, the second double lecture within our “Decolonizing Area Studies” series took place online, with great interest from different groups and constituencies.

For more information about this series and the project, please visit the “Decolonizing Area Studies” webpage.

Nicole Coleman is Assistant Professor of German at Wayne State University, where she teaches German language and culture classes at all levels and Global Studies courses on comparative literature and intercultural competence. Her main research areas are 20^th and 21^st century German literature, intercultural literature including but not limited to migrant and minority literature, and the intersection of literature and human rights. Her current book, entitled The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature, creates a taxonomy for reading human rights literature with an intercultural lens. The book includes literary analysis and approaches to teaching for social justice and intercultural citizenship with texts that center ambiguity and uncertainty. Nicole was also part of the team that co-authored Impuls Deutsch (2019 and 2020), a first- and second-year German language textbook series that centers questions of inclusion and interculturality.

José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia is Professor at the School of Language Sciences and the chair of the Major in ELT Education in the Interinstitutional Doctoral Program at Universidad del Valle, Colombia. His work focuses on expanding students’ meaning-making resources by articulating interculturality and multimodal pedagogies. His research interests include critical intercultural education and decolonial theory, and multimodal communication. His publications include the co-edited volumes Critical Views on Teaching and Learning English Around the Globe (2016) and Interculturality in Language Teacher Education: Theoretical and Practical Considerations (in press).

Several of the talks within this series are now available on the German Studies youtube channel.

Please join us later this Spring for the upcoming Symposium on May 21, 2021!