The Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Studies established the Angela Davis Visiting Professorship for International Gender and Diversity Studies at the beginning of the 2013/2014 winter semester. The visiting professorship named after her was launched in December 2013 by the US civil rights activist and critical social scientist Angela Davis, who was a guest at the Cornelia Goethe Centrum from 3 to 12 December 2013.
Davis, Emeritus Professor of Feminist and African American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is regarded as a pioneer of current critical discourse within gender and diversity studies. Her perspective on overlapping forms of inequality based on gender, ethnicity and class has become part of social science theorising as triple oppression. On the recommendation of her doctoral supervisor, Herbert Marcuse, Davis first came to Frankfurt as a young student in 1965 to study "critical theory" with Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas. It was here that she received decisive intellectual impulses that had a lasting influence on her further academic and political work, according to Davis today.
Angela Davis' commitment to the "Soledad Brothers", a group of prisoners, became a "key event" in the 1970s. During a failed liberation attempt in 1970, weapons registered to Davis were also used. She is put on the wanted list and is temporarily one of the FBI's "10 Most Wanted". She subsequently became a prisoner herself and, as a political prisoner, a "symbolic figure" of an international movement. Millions of people demanded her release and that of all political prisoners. She was finally acquitted in 1972. It was also her own experiences that made Angela Davis a fighter for the rights of political prisoners and a fierce critic of the prison-industrial complex.