Co-sponsored by European Studies, the War in Society and Culture Program and the Department of History.
This talk suggests that the children fathered by African American soldiers and white European women during the US occupation of Germany after the Second World War inherited a variant of wartime violence through their paternal illegitimacy, maternal abandonment, and the social exclusion that resulted from their racial mixture.
Through the story of one Black German adoptee it considers how the violence of war reverberates for generations and how war and its aftermath complicate racial and national identities.
Sabrina Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Studies at UW–Madison. Her research takes a transnational approach to the intersections of race, nation, and war and examines questions of citizenship, identity, and diaspora through the legacies of children born from international conflict. Her first book, Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) considered the issue of U.S. citizenship for the Amerasian children of Vietnam. Scars of War was awarded the 2021 “Best First Book” prize from Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society and was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. Dr. Thomas is the author of numerous articles including “Blood Politics: Reproducing the Children of ‘Others’ in the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act” published in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations (2019), and “When War Creates Life: Race, Nation, and Belonging for Children Born from War,” to the Cambridge History of War and Society in America (2026). She is currently working on her second book, The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians, and the African American Response. Prior to Texas Tech University, Dr. Thomas was an Associate Professor and the David A. Moore Chair of American History at Wabash College. She earned a B.A. in History from Colorado State University, M.S. in Counseling from Butler University, and Ph.D. in History from Arizona State University. Her recent interview on the podcast, Military Historians are People Too, is now available on Apple podcasts.