German Studies, with the generous support of American Studies, Africana Studies, English and European Studies hosted independent scholar Michael Saman, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and has taught at William and Mary, Brown, Princeton, UCLA and, most recently, The College of the Holy Cross. He is well-known for his expertise on Goethe and Goethezeit, philosophy and literature, and Modern German Thought. He has received awards from ACLS, the Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Goethe Society. He has co-edited, with Charlotte Szilaghyi and Sabrina Rahman, Imagining Blackness in Germany and Austria (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), and is currently preparing his book Peculiar Analogues: Goethe as a Reader of Kant for publication. He has many articles already published, forthcoming and in progress — on Schiller and Hegel, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Goethe and the origins of structuralism, Constructions of Kant and Goethe in German Intellectual Culture at the beginning of the 20th century, just to name a few. Michael presented “On Faust and the Souls of Black Folk: Goethe, W.E.B Du Bois and the Ethics of Progress.”