Heike Raphael-Hernandez

Heike Raphael-Hernandez is Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany and Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Maryland Global Campus, Europe. Together with Cheryl Finley (Cornell U) and Leigh Raiford (UC Berkeley), she was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship for 2015-2017 for their joined research project “Visualizing Travel, Gendering the African Diaspora.” She is one of the general editors of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture; she will be responsible for “Global Diasporas and Visual Culture.”

Among her recent publications are Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (with Leigh Raiford, U of Washington Press 2017) and  a special issue (with Pia Wiegmink) for the journal Atlantic Studies about “German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery” 14.4. (Fall 2017), which was republished as a book (Routledge, 2018). In addition, she is the editor of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (Routledge 2004), and AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (co-edited with Shannon Steen, NYU Press 2006). She is author of Contemporary African American Women Writers and Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (Edwin Mellen Press 2008) and Fear, Desire, and the Stranger Next Door: Global South Immigration in American Film (U of Washington Press, forthcoming).