Maria Alexopoulou interviews Fatima El-Tayeb
6 September 2024 (3pm UK time)
Fatima El-Tayeb is Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She was previously a member of the departments of Literature and Ethnic Studies and director of Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She received an MA in American Studies and Modern European History and a PhD in History from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include Black Europe, comparative diaspora studies, queer of color critique, critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, transnational feminisms, visual culture studies, race and technology, and critical European studies. Her publications deconstruct structural racism in “colorblind” Europe and center strategies of resistance among racialized communities, especially those that politicize culture through an intersectional, queer practice.
She is the author of three books - Schwarze Deutsche. ‘Rasse’ und nationale Identität 1890 – 1933 (2001), European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011) and Undeutsch. Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft (2016) - and numerous articles on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation.
Dr Maria Alexopoulou is a principal investigator at the Research Institute for Social Cohesionat the Center for Research on Antisemitism, at the Technische Universität Berlin and an unaffiliated lecturer at the Chair for Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim. She studied history and philosophy at Heidelberg University and holds a PhD in modern history from the Free Universität Berlin. Her main fields of research are the history of migration, the history of racism, and contemporary German and US history. Her habilitation ‘Rassistisches Wissen in der Transformation der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in eine Einwanderungsgesellschaft 1940–1990’ [Racist Knowledge in the Transformation of the Federal Republic of Germany into an Immigration Society 1940–1990] will be published in autumn 2024 by Wallstein Verlag.
Select publications:
Deutschland und die Migration: Geschichte einer Einwanderungsgesellschaft wider Willen (Ditzingen, 2020).
‘Ignoring Racism in the History of the German Immigration Society: Some Reflections on Comparison as an Epistemic Practice’, Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2/1 (2021), 1–13 (Read here)
‘Non-Citizens Protests in Germany since the 1980s’, Moving the Social, 66 (2021), 63 –87 (Read here)