Alicia Ellis

Alicia E. Ellis, Associate Professor of German, holds degrees from Amherst College (A.B. in German Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies) and Yale University (M.A. in African American Studies; M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures). She has studied at the Universities of Göttingen, Konstanz, and Heidelberg. Prior to her arrival at Colby in fall 2016, she was a Five College Fellow in German Literature (2006-2007) and taught in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College (2007-2008) before joining the faculty at Hampshire College from 2008 - 2016. She also spent two years at the University of Chicago as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Germanic Studies. Ellis is currently (2025-2026) a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Colby.

Ellis 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, Language and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas: Figuring the Female, was published in 2021 (Lexington Books). Her teaching and research interests beyond German literature and cultural studies include African American and Caribbean literatures, Black European Studies, Black Germany, Black feminist poetics, race and ethnicity, the modern short story, speculative fiction, and life writing. Her current project is an essay collection, “Piecework,” that explores gender, race, memory, immigration, and identity informed by Black feminist poetics. 

She is also the vice-chair of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA). She is on the executive board of the German Studies Association (GSA) where she represents Germanistik and Cultural Studies. Ellis serves on two editorial boards: The German Quarterly and Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association.  Professor Ellis is a former Junior Fellow of the Max Planck/Humboldt Research project, “Geschichte + Gedächtnis” (History + Memory) at Konstanz University and member of the faculty seminar on life writing at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) at UMASS Amherst.

Education

• A.B., Amherst College, German Literature & Women’s and Gender Studies
• M.A., Yale University, African American Studies
• M.A., M.Phil, Ph.D., Yale University, Germanic Languages and Literatures