DR. SONYA DONALDSON

Biography

Sonya Donaldson is Assistant Professor of African-American Studies at Colby College. Her research brings African American literature, Black German Studies, and Black digital humanities into conversation, with particular attention to identity, diaspora, performance, and technology.

She earned her doctorate in English language and literature at the University of Virginia, where she studied Afro-German autobiographical narratives. Before entering academia, she worked in journalism, including as technology editor at Black Enterprise. Her approach to research and teaching connects close attention to stories with critical questions about how media are created, circulated, and preserved.

Her scholarship on Black German girlhood examines family separation, racial identity, and national belonging through autobiographical narratives. In her 2019 article, “‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ Black German Girlhood and the Historical Entanglements of Nation,” she brings Doris McMillon’s Mixed Blessing and Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Invisible Woman into comparative conversation, contributing to discussions of adoption, kinship, and Black German childhoods.

Contributions to BGHRA

Donaldson’s longstanding collaboration with BGHRA founder and president Dr. Rosemarie Peña began through BGCS. She continued alongside Peña through the transition to BGHRA and has contributed continuously since the association’s establishment. Her sustained commitment to this shared work is an important part of BGHRA’s history and growth.

As BGHRA’s Executive Director of Media & Archives, Donaldson leads work on the documentation, organization, preservation, and public interpretation of the association’s audiovisual record. Her expertise connects Black German cultural expression with wider questions about digital archives, public memory, and the relationship between community and scholarly knowledge.

Explore the BGHRA Digital Archive and the association’s conference history.

Projects & Areas of Practice

Singing the Nation Into Being

Donaldson’s Singing the Nation Into Being is a Black digital humanities archive of video performances and user-created mashups of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson. Its 75 performances and mashups explore how sound and moving images carry Black history, cultural memory, and experiences of belonging.

Her concept of an “ephemeral archive” asks what can be preserved from digital materials that may disappear, and what those materials reveal about Black life. Explore the archive.

Black Life, Narrative & Artificial Intelligence

During her 2024–2025 fellowship at Colby’s Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Donaldson examined how large language models produce and reproduce narratives about Black people and Black life, with particular attention to Black girlhood. Her work included using ChatGPT to create poetry as a way to explore reshaping those narratives. Read the DavisAI annual report, page 19.

Selected Publications & Digital Scholarship

• Black German girlhood, family separation & belonging: “‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ Black German Girlhood and the Historical Entanglements of Nation”. Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 12–36. A comparative reading of Doris McMillon’s Mixed Blessing and Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Invisible Woman, exploring how disrupted family relationships and autobiographical storytelling illuminate racial and national belonging in Germany and the United States.
• The Ephemeral Archive: Unstable Terrain in Times and Sites of Discord. Chapter in The Digital Black Atlantic, examining digital media, memory, and Black diasporic archival practice.
• Digital scholarship: Singing the Nation: On Memory, Ephemerality, and the Minimal Computing Model. Donaldson’s account of the archival questions and technical choices shaping the project.
• Black German research: Dissent, Dissonance, Re-visioning: Performing ‘The Black National Anthem’ in Germany. An archived Rutgers/BGHRA presentation description connecting performance with Germany’s colonial history and the return of Herero remains.

Presentations, Interviews & Media

• Digital Archives Workshop. Facilitator, BGHRA/Africana conference Black Archives, Black Futures: Enfleshment, February 26–28, 2026.
• Singing the Nation: Memory, Meaning, and Resistance in ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’. Black History Month keynote, University of Illinois Chicago Women’s Leadership and Resource Center, February 25, 2021.
• On Ephemeral Archives: Curating Black Knowledges in the Digital Age. University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab presentation, December 4, 2019.

Interviews & Media

• Telling the Story. Colby interview on journalism, scholarship, digital humanities, and teaching (March 7, 2023).
• The Black Studies Podcast, episode 47. Conversation with John Drabinski about Black Studies, community work, and digital inquiry (October 14, 2024).