Alicia E. Ellis

Alicia E. Ellis is an interdisciplinary scholar and Associate Professor of German at Colby College. She is Chair of the Department of African American Studies. Her book in progress, Feminist Piecework: Assembling Black Diasporic Life, is a collection of essays exploring gender, race, memory, immigration, and identity informed by Black feminist poetics. To Alicia, Piecework refuses the demand that Black diasporic life become fully legible before it can count as thought. This writing is about what it means to bring autobiography into theory, where the essay form functions as a methodology for understanding the fragment. 

Her research interests include African American and Caribbean literatures, Black European Studies, Black Germany, Black feminist poetics, modern short prose, and speculative fiction. A lineage of Black women thinkers and Black women scholars has moved her research in recent years. Read her writing and publications.

Alicia was trained in German literature of the long 19th century (1789 -1914). She has written and lectured on ETA Hoffmann, Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Christa Wolf, Andrea Levy, Audre Lorde, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sam Selvon, Derek Walcott, Albert Camus, Edwidge Danticat, and Sharon Dodua Otoo. Her monograph, Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas: Figuring the Female, was published in 2021 (Lexington Books, Bloomsbury Publishing). She is a board member of The German Quarterly, Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, and the North American Heine Society (NAHS). She is also co-editor of Feminist German Studies.

At Colby College, she teaches courses such as “Black Germany” and “Women’s Literary, Cultural, and Visual Production.” She loves those moments when students pose questions that she can’t answer right away, where looking at the text together reveals something new. Alicia was most recently a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Colby. She was previously the Department Chair of German & Russian for five years.

Alicia E. Ellis has a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. She also received her MA in African American Studies. She has an AB in German Literature and Women and Gender Studies from Amherst College. Alicia was a Junior Fellow of the Max Planck/Humboldt Research project, “Geschichte + Gedächtnis” (History + Memory) at Konstanz University. She was member of the faculty seminar on life writing at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to her arrival at Colby in fall 2016, Alicia was a Five College Fellow in German Literature and taught in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College before joining the faculty at Hampshire College. She was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She is currently chair of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA).