5th Year PhD student, Co-Organizer, “Public Humanities History Slam,” 2015-16
“An American and Nothing Else: The Great War and the Battle for National Belonging,” Exhibition at Sterling Memorabilia Room and Digital Site. Anna Duensing is a PhD candidate in the joint program in History and African American Studies specializing in transnational U.S. and German social and cultural history. Her primary research concerns civil rights radicalism, antifascism, and far-right social movements in the context of the Cold War and in the U.S. military presence in postwar West Germany. In her dissertation, Duensing hopes to explore these aspects of the African American freedom struggle by chronicling the overlapping worlds of veterans, expats, civil rights activists, military officials, artists, segregationists, and white nationalist militants from the 1940s-1960s. Other interests include Holocaust studies, historical memory, documentary studies, the West German New Left, and transnational studies of the German-German border. In Spring 2019, Duensing will be a Visiting Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Duensing graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History and Memory Studies from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. With an avid commitment to Public Humanities, she has worked in various capacities at a number of museums and institutions, including the National September 11 Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the German-American Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she is currently a researcher and educator. She hails from Charlottesville, Virginia.