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Yale’s Fatima El-Tayeb to Deliver 2025 Reckford Lecture


January 15, 2025 | Kristen Chavez

Fatima El-Tayeb
Photo by Mara Lavitt

On Feb. 20, Yale University professor Fatima El-Tayeb will deliver the 2025 Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies in Hyde Hall at 4:00 p.m.

Her lecture, titled “Un/German. Racialized Otherness in Post–Cold War Europe,” examines the impacts of post-Cold War Europe’s reconceptualization of its past and present, with a particular focus on Germany.

El-Tayeb is a professor of ethnicity, race and migration and women’s, gender, and Sexuality studies at Yale University. Her research interests include Black Europe, comparative diaspora studies, queer of color critique, critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, transnational feminisms, visual culture studies, race and technology, and critical European studies.

In her lecture, El-Tayeb will present themes from her work, arguing that the current Europe-wide success of ethnonationalist parties is in large part due to post-Cold War Europe’s reconceptualization of its past and present. This narrative, which combined post-fascist and post-socialist narratives into a western capitalist success story also excluded a third factor in dire need of reassessment: Europe’s colonial past. That colonial past, she contends, manifested in a steadily growing postcolonial population that remains “un-European,” as ethnonationalist parties futilely attempt to define and fortify Europe’s physical, political and identitarian borders.

El-Tayeb argues further that the uneven ways in which fascism, socialism, and colonialism are remembered as shaping Europe are reflected in the continent’s ongoing inability to conceive of itself as multiethnic and multireligious. Within that context, El-Tayeb focuses on disturbances of public memory rituals by racialized communities to bring to the forefront unresolved tensions around European- and Germanness. It is in these disturbances, she suggests, that we find promising seeds of a different, more inclusive narrative, one that lets go of the single story of enlightened European superiority.

El-Tayeb has authored three books and numerous articles on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. Her upcoming publication, also titled Un/German: Racialized Otherness in Post-Cold War Europe, will be published this spring by Cornell University Press. She is a co-founder of the Intersectional Black European Studies project, a partnership with Technische Universität Berlin, the Regional Centre for Education, Integration and Democracy Berlin, and Yale University. El-Tayeb currently works on transformative archives both in theory and practice.

The Institute hosts the annual Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies, established in 1990 by classics professor emeritus Kenneth J. Reckford to honor his wife, Mary Stevens Reckford. Speakers are asked to provide “pleasure, instruction, an interdisciplinary approach and a sense of shared humanity.” Past speakers include art historian Christine Poggi, historian Ana Lucia Araujo, James Baldwin scholar Magdalena Zaborowska, and novelist Zia Haider Rahman. The Reckford Lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies.


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