Carola Lentz

Carola Lentz earned her doctorate at the University of Hanover in 1987 and qualified as professor (Habilitation) in 1996 at the Free University of Berlin. From 1996 until 2002 she was professor of anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt, and from 2002 until 2019 at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she is currently senior research professor. She served as president of the German Anthropological Association (2011-2015) and vice-president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2018-2020). Visiting professorships and fellowships have taken her to France, the Netherlands, the United States and South Africa. As a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin she led a focus group on the subject of Family History and Social Change in West Africa (2017-2018). Her research interests include ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, politics of remembrance, middle classes in the Global South and labour migration. She conducted field research first in South America and, since 1987, regularly in West Africa. Her publications include Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa (2013), Remembering Independence (2018) and Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family (2022). Since 2020, she serves as president of the Goethe-Institut.