Ethelene Whitmire

Ethelene is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison affiliated with the departments of African American Studies, German, Nordic, and Slavic, and Gender & Women’s Studies. She received an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship and a Lois Roth Endowment grant to support this project. She was also a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Transnational American Studies. Her first book, Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian, was published by the University of Illinois Press. Her second book project, Searching for a Rainbow: African Americans in 20th Century Denmark, is about African Americans who lived, performed, studied and visited Denmark. Educators, painters, social workers, writers, singers, jazz musicians among many others were drawn to this Scandinavian country. While many have written about African Americans in France, their experiences in Denmark have remained unexplored. Her project will answer several questions including: Why did African Americans go to Denmark? and What were their experiences while there? She argues that many of her subjects initially viewed Denmark as a utopia.