This February, Columbia University Press will publish Sarah Phillips Casteel’s monograph Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art as part of its major new series Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future, a collaboration with Howard University. Sarah’s book examines how, in the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of forgotten Black victims of the Third Reich. Bringing together Black and Holocaust studies, it challenges a longstanding compartmentalization of academic knowledge that has rendered Black wartime experiences invisible.
In conjunction with this book project, last June Sarah co-led with the anthropologist Jacqueline Nassy Brown (Hunter College) an international research workshop on “Black Lives Under Nazism” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The ten-day workshop brought together fourteen scholars at different stages of career from such fields as African American studies, Black German studies, and Holocaust studies. Sarah’s research on a Caribbean internment camp artist also recently inspired an episode of a 2023 Dutch national television documentary series about forgotten Black figures in European history. She was elected this year to the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation.
