Faculty

Maria Höhn

Professor of History on the Marion Musser Lloyd '32 Chair of History and International Studies

  • Office: Old Laundry Building 320
  • Office hours: Tues 3:00-5:00, Wed 12:00-1:00 or by Appt.
  • Phone: 437-5677
  • Box: 564
  • Email: mahoehn@vassar.edu

Maria Höhn teaches German history and is an established scholar of the American military presence in Germany. Her book, GIs and Fräuleins, published in 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press was the first book to address the experiences of African American soldiers in Germany. A German translation of her book Amis, Cadillacs, und "Negerliebchen": GIs im Nachkriegsdeutschland was published with Verlag Berlin-Brandenburg in 2008. Together with Seungsook Moon she has co-authored and co-edited Over There: Living with The U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present which explores the impact of U.S. military bases on gender and race relations in West Germany, South Korea and Japan (Duke, 2010). She is the co-author (with Martin Klimke) of A Breath of Freedom. African American GIs, the Civil Rights Struggle and Germany (Palgrave 2010). In 2010, the German Academic Exchange Service and the German Studies Association awarded her essay, “The Black Panther Solidarity Committees and the Voice of the Lumpen” the prize for best article.

Höhn is the co-director of “The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany” (http://aacvr-germany.org), a digital archive and oral-history collection that the NAACP honored during the organization’s centennial convention in 2009 with the Julius E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award. A photography exhibition based on that research project has been shown at universities and museums in the United States, Germany and Great Britain for the past two years. She has also served as a historical consultant and co-narrator for a number of television documentaries on the impact of the American military on Germany society, and the experience of African American GIs in that country. Most recently Höhn has been advising filmmaker Maia Wechsler for Melvin and Jean: An American Story, a documentary that aired on French public TV and premiered at the NYC Documentary Film Festival in November 2012.  She also has been working with ZDF (German Public TV) on a documentary on the Germans and the Vietnam War, which will air in May 2013. German Public TV, ARTE and Smithonian TV are currently producing a 90-minute documentary based on her research on African American GIs and their contributions to the civil rights struggle. Höhn is the recipient of prestigious grants from the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, the DAAD, and the American Philosophical Society.