Rate My Professor Alicia Ellis

Alicia E. Ellis is Associate Professor of German at Colby College, where she joined the Department of German and Russian in fall 2016. She earned an A.B. in German Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies from Amherst College, an M.A. in African American Studies from Yale University, and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Ellis has also studied at the Universities of Göttingen, Konstanz, and Heidelberg. Her previous appointments include faculty positions at Hampshire College (2008–2016), Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, instructor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College (2007–2008), and Five College Fellow in German Literature (2006–2007). Currently, she serves as Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Colby College for the 2025–2026 academic year.

An interdisciplinary scholar of comparative literature, Ellis specializes in German literature of the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), alongside interests in 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 book project, the essay collection “Piecework,” examines gender, race, memory, immigration, and identity through the lens of Black feminist poetics. She has engaged with works by authors such as E.T.A. 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. Notable publications include her monograph Language and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas: Figuring the Female (Lexington Books, 2021) and the chapter “Upended” in the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence. Ellis holds leadership roles as vice-chair of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA), executive board member of the German Studies Association (GSA) for Germanistik and Cultural Studies, and editorial board member for The German Quarterly and Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association. She was formerly a Junior Fellow in the Max Planck/Humboldt project “Geschichte + Gedächtnis” at the University of Konstanz and participated in the faculty seminar on life writing at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst.