LANCASTER, Pa.- Maria Höhn, associate professor of history at Vassar College, will discuss "Love Across the Color Line: The Limits of German and American Democracy, 1945-1968" on Tuesday, April 3 at 4:30 p.m. in Franklin & Marshall's Stahr Auditorium, Stager Hall. The talk, sponsored by the Africana Studies Program, the Public Affairs Lecture Fund, the International Studies Program, and the History Department, is free and open to the public. Born and raised in West Germany Maria Höhn has been living in the United States since 1983. In 1991, she graduated from Millersville State and attended the University of Pennsylvania as a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. The focus of her doctoral studies was modern German history, European cultural history, and European women's history. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1995, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania for one year. Since the fall of 1996 she has been teaching at Vassar College. In her book GIs and Fräuleins. The German American Encounter in 1950s West Germany, (UNC Press, 2002), Höhn shows how West German society modernized during the 1950s. She was particularly interested in studying how generational, class and gender differences impacted decisions about the new democracy and American popular culture. Her book also explores how Germans dealt with their Nazi past, and to what degree racism and antisemitism remained crucial categories in which Germans debated a new national identity. Höhn has given numerous papers and published articles in both the United States and Germany on the topics of Americanization, German gender politics after the war, and German attitudes toward race and anti-Semitism in the postwar years. She has also served as a historical consultant and co-narrator for two German television productions on the impact of the American military on Germany society. Her new research project explores how African American GIs brought the civil rights struggle to Germany and how German society and the U.S. military responded to those demands. Together with her colleague Seungsook Moon at Vassar she is also compiling a collection of essay on Gender and Sexuality in the Global U.S. Military Empire.
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