our team

Carmen Geschke is founder and President of Protec Enterprises LLC, a Greer SC based company founded in 2004. Protec Enterprises offers multiple production capabilities and performs all types of quality services, from delivery to inspection to rework, as well as Quality Management, internal and external. 

Protec Enterprises is ISO 9001 :2000 certified, as well as a Minority Business Enterprise certified with CMSDC and a Women owned business certified with WBENC Previously she was Vice President Finance for a German based Automotive Supplier in Michigan and held the Controller position for an Automotive company located in Duncan, SC.

A native of Germany, she is a graduate of VWA Stuttgart, a Wirtschafts- & Verwaltungsakademie where she received a degree in Accounting. She is a US citizen and resides in South Carolina.

Dr. Leroy Hopkins is a local historian, Millersville University professor emeritus of German, and Lancaster resident. He received his bachelor’s degree from Millersville and his Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Over the last 40 years, Professor Hopkins has been collecting, researching, and writing about Lancaster’s African American history. He has published nine articles in The Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society. He has stepped down from his role as president of the African American Historical Society of South Central Pennsylvania to do extensive research for his latest passion project: a documentary on African Americans’ history in Lancaster county.

Emily Frazier-Rath is an educator and researcher rooted in the fields of German Studies, Migration Studies, and Feminist Studies. In addition to her work for the BGHRA, she is also currently Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. She earned her PhD in German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder in May 2019, and her MA in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati in 2013. Emily’s most recent publication entitled To Be Seen and to Be Whole: Black German FLINTA* on Community, Identity, and Connection appeared in The German Quarterly in fall 2022.

Emily taught the inaugural Beginning German I class for Black German adoptees and their families in May 2022, which was made possible through the generous support of the Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Emily’s current research centers on the pedagogical effects of engaging in transnational and transcultural dialog to build mutual understanding through deep, community-based learning in the humanities classroom. This work is informed by her collaboration with Dr. Rosemarie Peña in two courses they have introduced to the Davidson College curriculum: Black German Art & Resistance and Race, Gender, Migration.

For further info, visit her website HERE!

Elisabeth Clarke-Hasters studied classical ballet and modern dance in Philadelphia, in North Carolina and at the School of American Ballet in New York She began her acting studies at age 13, and was a member of the Children’s Repertory Theatre in Philadelphia and the Poor People’s Theatre in New York. She was also a member of the Dance Theater of Harlem. She came to Europe in 1971to study at the Mudra school of Maurice Béjart, and danced with the Ballet du XXème Siècle. Before turning to choreography and teaching she worked extensively with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pina Bausch, and performed as an actress in the municipal theaters of Köln, Düsseldorf and Koblenz.

Clarke-Hasters has been a choreographer for the Salzburg Festival, the Burgtheater Wien, the Maggio Musi-cale in Florence, the Oper Leipzig, among others. She was assistant school director at the Arturo Schauspielschule in Köln, and school director at Die Etage in Berlin, where she also led the dance department until 2018. She has also developed several programs for dance in schools, specifically combining dance composition and STEM curriculum. In 2010 she completed her training as a per-sonal development coach and is presently developing several new programs, including a coaching program specifically for People of Color.

Keith Green is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Rutgers–Camden. Dr. Green’s main research and teaching interests lie in African American literature, with more specific investments in the study of the antebellum era, self-referential writing, African-Native American literature, and slave narratives. He has delivered papers on Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and William Wells Brown. His current book project, Not Just Slavery: African Americans Write Captivity Narratives, Too: 1816-1879, explores the various kinds of bondage and confinement–specifically Indian slavery, Barbary captivity, and state imprisonment–African Americans experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century.

Silke Hackenesch is an assistant professor at the Institute for North American History at the University of Cologne. She specializes in 20thcentury Childhood and Adoption Studies, African American History, Commodity History, and Black Diaspora Studies.

Silke is the author of Chocolate and Blackness: A Cultural History (Campus, 2017). Other publications include “’Hergestellt unter ausschließlicher Verwendung von Kakaobohnen deutscher Kolonien’–On Representations of Chocolate Consumption as a Colonial Endeavor,“ in Tiffany N. Florvil, Vanessa Plumly (eds.). Rethinking Black German Studies (Peter Lang, 2018); “’I identify primarily as a Black German in America:’ Race, Bürgerrechte und Adoptionen in den USA der 1950er Jahre,“ in Kinder des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Campus, 2016); and the co-edited volume of the Black Diaspora and Germany Network (ed). The Black Diaspora and Germany/ Die Schwarze Diaspora in Deutschland (Edition Assemblage, 2018).
Currently, Silke also edited the volume Making Families Across Race and Nation: The Histories and Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (forthcoming with Ohio State University Press in 2021); and working on a manuscript tentatively titled ’My Faith in Americans is Renewed with every Adoption’: Transnational and Transracial Adoptions in Postwar America“ which looks at discourses of racial identity and national belonging in relation to intercountry adoptions to the United States.
Silke’s work has been supported, among others, by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Thyssen Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY), the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC), and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.