Congratulations to Dr. Joshua Kramer on his successful dissertation defense! 

Joshua presented and answered questions about his dissertation research, "A Gaze Upon the Colonized: Developments in the Ethnographic Discourse of Black Africans in German Colonial Novels." Examining three novels spanning Germany's colonial era, Frieda von Bülow’s Tropenkoller (1896), Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1906), and Hans Grimm’s Die Olewagen-Saga (1918), the work shows that fictional depictions of race and Black Africans changed from the early days of Germany’s colonial enterprise to its close at the end of WWI. 

The dissertation's analyses document an overall movement from an imperial gaze that served efforts to govern and control colonized people, to a genocidal gaze that viewed them as threats to be eliminated, to a settler gaze took them for granted as a marginalized workforce separate from settlers’ quest for land and wealth. These depictions aligned with shifting colonial policies and preoccupations, so that the dissertation highlights connections between policy and literary representations.

We commend Dr. Kramer's hard work and perseverance and are delighted with his success!