The Invention of German Ethnicity
Steven Mark Carey, Ph.D.

This talk presents the earliest Greco-Roman contact with peoples identified as “Germans” and trace their expansion from the Crimean Peninsula, over the whole of Europe and into North Africa. From these pan-European developments, we can then trace the
slow development of the German ethnic identity to the current peoples, cultures, and nations that we associate with it. We discover that German as we know it today is primarily a linguistic community that only slowly became the cohesive cultural unit and
people that we now identify as German.
Professor Carey has published on Medieval European Literature with an emphasis on the 12th and 13th centuries and Historical Linguistics but also maintains teaching specialties in Second Language Acquisition, Novel Theory, German and Scandinavian Literature, and Gender Studies. Professor Carey is a Fulbright Fellow, completed his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis and has taught at Emory University, Georgia State University and
the University of Bergen in Norway. Professor Carey is currently Chair of the German Department and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.