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, and youth fiction — taught ordinary readers, and especially children, to live with colonial violence. My argument is that narrative voice, not content, was the technology that made that violence habitable, turning conquered territory into an imaginative extension of Heimat. I call this the unsigned voice, which 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 ends with the sworn testimony of Herero and Nama survivors — the first place in the archive 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.