DR. EMILY FRAZIER-RATH

Biography

Emily Frazier-Rath is a scholar, educator, and the founder of Frazier-Rath Editing & Indexing. She earned her Ph.D. in German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2019, following graduate study in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She also holds a graduate certificate in Jewish Studies.

She is a Humanities Educator at Elysium School of Innovation and leads Frazier-Rath Editing & Indexing. Her work spans teaching, research, writing, and professional support for authors.

She taught German Studies at Davidson College from 2019 to 2024. Her research addresses Black German community, identity, and cultural expression, as well as migration, racialization, gender, and Muslim women’s feminisms in Germany. Her current editorial practice supports writers across the humanities and social sciences through developmental editing, copyediting, and indexing.

Contributions to BGHRA

Frazier-Rath has served as BGHRA’s Executive Director of Education Initiatives since 2021. She develops teaching partnerships, educator engagement, and learning opportunities that connect Black German scholarship and cultural production with students and community participants.

She met BGHRA founder Dr. Rosemarie Peña at the 2019 DDGC conference. Their subsequent collaboration brought Black German community knowledge and research into Davidson courses, including Black German Art & Resistance and Race, Gender, Migration.

She helped coordinate BGHRA’s Sam – A Saxon U.S. educational tour in September 2023, working with Rosemarie Peña and institutional partners to connect students and public audiences with the series’ cast, creators, and Samuel Meffire. The tour began at Davidson College and continued to Chicago and New York, combining screenings, discussion, and student masterclasses.

Explore BGHRA at Davidson and the Black German Art & Resistance syllabus (PDF).

A Teaching Partnership Rooted in Trust

A reflection from BGHRA founder Dr. Rosemarie Peña

Emily and I first met at a DDGC conference. At a later event, we worked together on a panel, with Emily moderating and me taking notes. I was not a particularly good note taker, but Emily’s own notes more than made up for mine. It was an early glimpse of the care and generosity she would bring to our work together.

Our relationship became unlike any other collegial relationship I have had in this work. For two years, we worked directly together with students at Davidson College. This was the only period in which I taught consistently, and it was Emily who made that opportunity possible. Our trust and camaraderie shaped the classroom and the relationships that grew within it. The wrestlers were an important part of this learning community. They encouraged their teammates to take our courses, carrying the relationships and conversations beyond the classroom. Their enthusiasm is one of the clearest memories I have of the reach of our teaching together.

From the beginning, Emily understood the ethical responsibilities of this work. I did not have to explain why Black Germans must be represented honestly, or why teaching must be accountable to the people whose lives and histories it presents. We shared that commitment immediately. Her attention to ethical representation and honest pedagogy is fundamental to why she serves as BGHRA’s Executive Director of Education Initiatives.

I do not believe we will ever know the full impact of the relationships our courses helped students form, or of the connections that grew through the Sam – A Saxon educational tour featuring Malick Bauer. I could not have done this work without Emily. Although our Davidson teaching period ended, our partnership continues. She remains an important adviser to me and helps guide BGHRA’s educational work, from middle school through university and beyond, with the same commitment to representing us honestly.

The Wrestlers & Connections Beyond the Classroom

Rosemarie remembers the wrestlers as an important part of the learning community she and Emily built at Davidson. Their enthusiasm led them to encourage teammates to take the courses, extending the relationships and conversations beyond the classroom.

The photograph of Malick Bauer with Davidson wrestlers offers a glimpse of the personal connections surrounding BGHRA’s educational work and the Sam – A Saxon tour.

Explore the published final group project by Gavin Damasco, Steven Newell, and Garrett Stewart, and browse the digital archive’s Davidson Student Projects collection.

Davidson: Student Work & Lasting Connections

The published final projects and student reflections show how participants connected historical study with art, personal experience, and the responsibilities of representation. Students created music, painting, poetry, collaborative visual narratives, and recorded presentations. Their work now forms part of BGHRA’s Davidson teaching archive.

• Jay’La Evans: Pathways of Migration. Her painting responds to voluntary and involuntary migration and Black transnational adoptee experiences. In her accompanying reflection, Evans describes how preparation, direct conversations with guests, and affirmation in the classroom strengthened her critical thinking, confidence in her identity, and readiness to advocate for others.
• Isaac Bynum: musical final project. Bynum’s written analysis explains how his arrangement of Lift Every Voice and Sing connects African diasporic community, the tensions of belonging, and Black German transnational adoption. He relates the course to his own experience as an African American man.
• Ghadeer Muhammed: Art as Education. Muhammed examines how learning through artists’ work and first-hand conversations can challenge interpretations imposed by outsiders. Her reflection explicitly considers her own perspective and the need to understand art in relation to its maker’s lived experience. Her page also hosts the BGHRA 2023 Student Roundtable recording.
• Carson Crochet & Rebecca Long: Scrapbook: Exploring Transnational Black Narratives. The archive preserves their collaborative visual project as a digital scrapbook and downloadable PDF.
• Gavin Damasco, Steven Newell & Garrett Stewart: On Amal Abass: The Impacts of Transgenerational Trauma. Their page preserves a recorded final group project on this topic.
• Danai Psaradelli: The Stories Behind the Story. Published poems consider whose perspective shapes a story, the differences within shared experiences, and everyday encounters that question belonging.

Together, these works offer a record of students learning to question their assumptions and attend to how people describe their own lives. The reflections provide students’ own accounts of what the courses meant to them.

Projects & Areas of Practice

• Frazier-Rath Editing & Indexing. Editorial support, indexing, and writing-focused programs for scholars and other authors.
• Davidson courses and community-engaged teaching. Her collaboration with Rosemarie Peña included Black German Art & Resistance and Race, Gender, Migration, connecting students with Black German artists, activists, scholarship, and BGHRA’s conferences and archive. Race, Gender, Migration syllabus (PDF).
• Writing workshops. Her professional programs include the Summer Research and Writing Kickoff and reading conversations. Past workshops and events.

Selected Publications & Digital Scholarship

• Unpacking Activism. DavidsonX online course exploring activism, collaboration, and social change; course materials are archived on edX.
• “To Be Seen and to Be Whole: Black German FLINTA* on Community, Identity, and Connection.” The German Quarterly 95 (2022): 469–480.
• “Sexualized Violence and Racialized Others: Syrian Refugee Activism and Constructions of Difference Immediately after Cologne.” Feminist German Studies 37, no. 2 (2021).
• “Mutual Aid in Our German Studies Communities: Why and How to do Collective Organizing and Care Work in Academia,” with Maggie Rosenau.

Presentations, Interviews & Media

• The Films of Branwen Okpako, 2022. While at Davidson, she served on the selection committee for the call for papers co-sponsored by BGHRA and the DEFA Film Library. At the German Studies Association conference in Houston, she was the panel commentator and co-moderated the filmmaker Q&A with Sara Lennox. Conference program and event details.
• BGHRA conference teaching and public conversation. At the 2024 conference, she moderated Oliver Hardt’s keynote and presented with students. The 2026 CFP also documents her pedagogy workshop, Teaching Ethical Black German and European Cultural Studies.
• Collaboration, Transparency, Accessibility: How to Radically Rethink the Classroom and Our Roles within It. Workshop with Dr. Rosemarie Peña, ALTEC, University of Colorado Boulder, March 14, 2022. Workshop description and recording.
• Professional biography and selected work. Frazier-Rath Editing & Indexing.