Prof. Dr. Priscilla Layne

Department of German Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Priscilla Layne is professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed her BA at the University of Chicago, and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. After her undergraduate studies, Layne received a Fulbright teaching fellowship in Berlin, followed by a grant from the Study Foundation of the Berlin Parliament to conduct a qualitative analysis of the leftist skinhead scene. Layne is author of “White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture” (Michigan, 2018) and co-editor of “Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History, and Art” (with Melissa Etzler, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and “Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990” (with Ela Gezen and Jonathan Skolnik, 2022). Her work has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Institute for African American Research, among others. Layne has also received several grants from the German Embassy to develop programming on the University of North Carolina campus. After serving as Vice President from 2020 to 2021, Dr. Layne was President of the American Association of Teachers of German through 2023.