Ingrid Bauer – författare

This collection of surveys and research articles explores a fascinating class of varieties: Beauville surfaces. It is the first time that these objects are discussed from the points of view of algebraic geometry as well as group theory. The book also includes various open problems and conjectures related to these surfaces.

Beauville surfaces are a class of rigid regular surfaces of general type, which can be described in a purely algebraic combinatoric way. They play an important role in different fields of mathematics like algebraic geometry, group theory and number theory. The notion of Beauville surface was introduced by Fabrizio Catanese in 2000 and after the first systematic study of these surfaces by Ingrid Bauer, Fabrizio Catanese and Fritz Grunewald, there has been an increasing interest in the subject.

These proceedings reflect the topics of the lectures presented during the workshop ‘Beauville surfaces and groups 2012’, held at Newcastle University, UK in June 2012. This conference brought together, for the first time, experts of different fields of mathematics interested in Beauville surfaces.

This volume addresses an issue that was until recently taboo: children fathered by Black American GIs who were stationed in Europe during and after World War II and whose mothers were local citizens. They were born into societies that defined themselves as White and rejected this extremely visible portion of the so-called occupation children.

Black and White are in this volume not (only) understood as descriptions of skin color, but above all as social constructs and political categories with racist attributions and effects. The authors of the contributions examine the manner in which these mixed-race children and their mothers were treated by their societies and the respective authorities; they assess the experiences and self-understandings of the individuals affected; they discuss their institutionalization and the strategy practiced by the youth welfare agencies of giving these children up for adoption abroad; and finally they highlight how African American couples in the USA interpreted the adoption of these mixed-race children from Europe as an act of Black resistance against White supremacy.