About

I am Assistant Professor of German and a Faculty Affiliate in Africana Studies at Williams College, where students know me as Prof. O.G.

My work examines how popular print culture in Imperial Germany — magazines, memoirs, campaign novels, youth fiction, and the satirical press — taught ordinary readers to live with colonial violence. My argument is that narrative voice, far more than content, was the technology that made that violence habitable, turning conquered territory into an imaginative extension of Heimat. I trace four narrative techniques across that print, and the first, which I call the unsigned voice, is the way a printed page can say a thing that no one has to answer for.

My book manuscript, Paper Empire: Print Culture and the Colonial Imagination in Imperial Germany, develops this across six decades of German print, from 1855 to 1918, and closes its final chapter on the sworn testimony of Herero and Nama survivors — the first place in this record where the colonized speak in something close to their own voice. It is complete in draft and in revision during a fellowship year at the Oakley Center at Williams College.

My next project follows those silenced voices further: the Germans who opposed the colonial project, and the Africans whose resistance the Empire's print culture wrote over. I hold a PhD in German and Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, and degrees from the University of Mississippi and the University of Ibadan.

I am also a self-taught photographer, and I co-founded Petxls with Love, a fundraiser whose framed prints support an orphanage, a home for the blind, and an under-resourced secondary school in Nigeria.