Carola Lentz is a Senior Research Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, where until 2019 she held a chair in Ethnology. Her research is focused chiefly on West Africa, and concentrates on the topics of ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, the politics of remembrance and the middle classes in the global south. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and of the German National Academy of Sciences, known as the ‘Leopoldina’. She has been President of the Goethe Institute since 2020.
