Overview
Anne Adams, Professor Emerita, specializes in the two areas of continental African women’s writing and Afro-German cultural studies, her publications reflecting both areas. Upon retiring from ASRC, she served as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture, in Accra, Ghana, 2005-2010.
In recent years Anne Adams has been devoting her attention to the novelist Toni Morrison, whose A. D. White Professorship-at-Large at Cornell she had initiated and hosted (1997-2003). Her scholarly work on Morrison over the decades primarily consisted of consulting for the German translators and publishers on African American discourse and cultural content in Morrison’s novels. In the years since Morrison’s death, in 2019, Adams has devoted much of her time to the work of the faculty group Toni Morrison Collective, whose mission of preserving the legacy of this Cornell alumna (MA 1955) has taken the form of, e.g., programs on campus and in the Ithaca community commemorating the 30th anniversary of her Nobel Prize, in 2023. Adams’ passionate project, however, is the book she’s writing about Toni Morrison’s influence on how European audiences perceive U.S. life and history.