Founder & President
Dr. Rosemarie Peña
Rosemarie Peña, Ph.D., is a scholar of Black German Studies, transnational adoption, childhood, kinship, and diaspora, and founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA), based in Africana Studies at Rutgers University–Camden. A member of the postwar generation of Black German transnational adoptees, she brings lived experience into conversation with interdisciplinary scholarship, archival practice, and public humanities. Her professional background in social work and developmental psychology, including work with traumatized youth, continues to shape her child-centered, relational, and ethically engaged approach to research and teaching.
Peña earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Childhood Studies from Rutgers–Camden and bachelor's degrees in Psychology and German. She served as Adjunct Professor of German Studies at the University of British Columbia and co-taught Race, Gender, Migration and Black German Art and Resistance at Davidson College with Emily Frazier-Rath. Her publications appear in Adoption & Culture, Genealogy, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, and edited volumes in German and English, including Adoption across Race and Nation and Children of the Liberation.
Through BGHRA, Peña has produced nine international conferences, cultivated transatlantic scholarly and community networks, mentored students, and advanced public knowledge of Black German history and culture. Her work centers adoptee narratives, rekinning, archival recovery, citizenship, and belonging, and includes development of A Special Collection on Black German and Adoption Studies at the Paul Robeson Library, Rutgers–Camden, to be celebrated during BGHRA's tenth international conference in February 2027. Her scholarship remains accountable to the communities it represents.
