Since the winter term 2017/2018, the University of Cologne has hosted a visiting lectureship in Gender & Queer Studies. The guest program is a subproject curated by GeStiK (Cologne Centre of Gender Studies) in cooperation with the Department of Gender and Diversity Management and Vice-Rector for Equality and Diversity of the University of Cologne. The main goal of the project is to promote theoretical and methodological perspectives of Gender and Queer Studies in teaching and research at the university.

The visiting lecturer for the winter term 2018/19, Dr. des. Vanessa Eileen Thompson, was invited by the Faculty of Human Sciences, in particular the Competence Area SINTER (Social Inequalities and Intercultural Education).

Dr. des. Vanessa Eileen Thompson is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Her research and teaching are focused on critical racism and migration studies, gender and queer studies, post- and decolonial feminist theories and methodologies, black studies, critical security studies, and qualitative methods. Her dissertation, Solidarities in Black: Anti-Black Racism, Black Urban Activism and the Struggle beyond Recognition in Paris, explores forms of black urban activism and anti-racist mobilizations against anti-black racism in France as well as analyzes the re-production of coloniality and anti-blackness through the workings of neoliberal French Republican Universalism. Her current research project focuses on racial gendered policing in Europe and transnational articulations of abolitionist visions and alternatives from a black feminist perspective.

During the winter term 2018/19, she wil be teaching the following classes: 

• 15181.4470 Versicherheitlichung der Gesellschaft. Post- und dekolonial-feministische Perspektiven
• 15181.4476 Intersektionalität: Konturen und Debatten eines vielschichtigen Paradigmas

Member of the International Faculty

Stays in Cologne: June-July 2015, February 2016, May-June 2017

Ofelia García is a professor in the Ph.D. Program of Urban Education and of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She has been a Professor of Bilingual Education at Columbia University's Teachers College, Dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, and a Professor of Education at The City College of New York. Among her best-known books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective; Translanguaging; Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Li Wei); Educating Emergent Bilinguals (with J. Kleifgen), Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity (with J. Fishman), Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers (with K. Menken), Imagining Multilingual Schools (with T. Skutnabb-Kangas and M. Torres-Guzmán), and A Reader in Bilingual Education (with C. Baker). She is the Associate General Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and co-editor of Language Policy (with H. Kelly-Holmes). For the past three and a half years, García has been co-principal investigator of CUNY-NYSIEB. García’s extensive publication record on bilingualism and the education of bilinguals is grounded in her life experience living in New York City after leaving Cuba at the age of 11, teaching language minority students bilingually, educating bilingual and ESL teachers, and working with doctoral students researching these topics.

Contact: ogarcia(at)gc.cuny.edu