Heidi R. Lewis

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Heidi R. Lewis
Born	(1981-09-15) September 15, 1981 Alliance, OH, United States
Education	B.A., English, Robert Morris University (2003) M.A., English Literature, Ohio University (2005) Ph.D., American Studies, Purdue University (2011)
Spouse	Antonio Lewis (married 2003–present)
Children	Antonio Aaron Patrick Lewis, Jr. and Chase R. Lewis
Parent(s)	Robin R. Stewart and Jerome L. Freeman
Website	femgeniuses.com

Dr. Heidi R. Lewis is President of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and David & Lucile Packard Professor and Associate Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. Her areas of specialization are Feminist Theory and Politics with an emphasis in Black Feminism, Hip Hop Discourse, specifically Rap, and Critical Media Studies.

Early Career

After graduating from Alliance High School in 1999, Lewis earned a B.A. in English Studies from Robert Morris University in 2003. While pursuing her doctorate, she also earned a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Purdue in 2008 and another in Online Teaching & Learning from Ivy Tech Community College the same year.

National Women's Studies

Lewis has been an active member of NWSA since she was selected to participate in the Women of Color Leadership Project in 2008. In addition to serving as a regular conference proposal reviewer and graduate student mentor, she routinely attended the annual conference and the Chairs and Directors meeting. She was also selected to attend the Association's first Curriculum Institute. Her journey to leadership within the Association started with her founding the Feminist Media Studies Interest Group in 2015. Subsequently, she was elected Secretary in 2021 and served as a Women of Color Leadership Project Co-Chair in 2023. Most recently, she was elected to serve as the Association’s 22nd President.

Early in her presidency, Lewis released a strategic plan, "Reconnect, Repair, Restore: A More Thoughtful, Transparent, and Trustworthy NWSA", which aims to “galvanize a recommitment to the multivocal and multidirectional intellectual traditions central to our field in thoughtful, transparent, and trustworthy ways.” She will also lead the Association through two of its annual conferences in Detroit (2024) and Puerto Rico (2025). As content leader, she selected the following themes, “The Journey not only the Arrival, Critical Connections not only Critical Mass: (Re)thinking Feminist Movements,” which honors Grace Lee Boggs, and “An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories,” which uplifts indigenous theorizing and postcolonial critique and honors Kiera L. Ladner and Leanne Simpson’s This is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades (2010).

Colorado College

In 2010, Lewis earned a dissertation fellowship in Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College through the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD). After serving as Visiting Assistant Professor the following year, she entered the tenure-track and then earned tenure in 2018 during the 2017-18 AY. She served as Director of Feminist & Gender Studies department chair from 2016-22 AY, including terms as Interim and Associate Director. She regularly teaches Introduction to Feminist & Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Critical Media Studies, Black Feminist Theory, Hip Hop and Feminism, and the department’s first study abroad course, Hidden Spaces, Hidden Narratives: Intersectionality Studies in Berlin.

Lewis has also held other administrative and governance-related roles at the College, including terms on the Social Sciences Executive Committee, the Academic Advisory Council to the acting Co-Presidents, and the Faculty Executive Committee. She also served as Inaugural Chair of the Community Safety Accountability Committee and Inaugural Coordinator for Early Career Faculty Development Programs. In the latter role, Lewis directed two programs supporting over 50 contingent, tenure-track, and tenured faculty, the Riley Scholars-in-Residence Program (RSiRP) and the Mentoring Alliance Program (MAP) she co-created with Dr. Peony Fhagen. . RSiRP offers one-year fellowships to predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars hired through the CFD. Similarly, MAP was created to facilitate a college-wide shift regarding early career faculty development from a hierarchical, disempowering approach to one that recognizes the skills and talents of early career faculty and to support tenured faculty committed to developing their capacity for robust, intentional mentoring.

Scholarship

Lewis is currently working on a single-authored manuscript entitled “Make Rappers Rap Again!: Interrogating the Mumble Rap ‘Crisis’” (under contract with Oxford University Press). In it, she interrogates the ways Mumble Rap has been subjugated within “real” Hip Hop (or the most authentic), sometimes even expelled altogether and situated as the catalyst for its demise.

Her first book, In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk (edition assemblage, 2021), co-edited with Dana Asbury and Jazlyn Andrews, is the 7th edition of Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winner Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Witnessed Series, an English-language book series featuring Black writers who have lived in Germany. The project is indebted to the relationships Lewis built and the worlds she co-imagined and created while teaching her study abroad course. In Audre’s Footsteps honors Black intellectual traditions set forth by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Angela Y. Davis, and Audre Lorde, all of whom were influenced by their experiences in Berlin. Engaging Black and Transnational feminist frameworks, it explores the resistive and generative experiences of Black and women of color intellectuals in Berlin and the United States, examining how they resist and revise oppressive narratives and how they address the always advantageous but sometimes contentious contours of solidarity. In Audre’s Footsteps features a “Foreword” co-authored by Jasmin Eding and Judy Gummich, co-founders of ADEFRA: Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland, the first grassroots activist organization for Black German women; Ria Cheatom, a member of ADEFRA, and co-author of Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984 to 1992; and Ika Hügel-Marshall, a member of ADEFRA, co-author of The Berlin Years, and author of Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, the first single-authored book by a Black person in Germany.

More recently, Lewis published “Expertise” in the second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, edited by Catherine M. Orr and Ann M. Braithwaite, as well as “If We Bury the Ratchet, We Risk Burying Black Women: A New Directions Analysis of Married to Medicine” in Layli Maparyan’s Womanism Rising. She has also published in Julius Bailey’s The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, Unteilbar: Bündnisse gegen Rassismus, and other publications; and contributed to NewBlackMan, NPR, Ms., Bitch, and Act Out, along with giving talks at Vanderbilt, the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, the University of Georgia, the Kampagne für Opfer Rassistischer Polizeigewalt, and other organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Berlin.

References

Category:Scholars and academics

Category:Feminism