OUR TEAM
We are a team brought together by scholarship and sustained by friendship, trust, and a shared vision. Over years of working, learning, and creating together, we have become a family whose care for one another informs everything we do. Our different histories, experiences, and talents deepen our collective understanding and our commitment to honoring Black German lives. That spirit extends to the relationships we build across international, scholarly, artistic, and adoptee communities—relationships grounded in mutual respect, generosity, and the belief that knowledge and belonging grow through connection.
EXECUTIVE STAFF
Dr. Rosemarie Peña
Founder and President
Rosemarie Peña is a German-born Black German adoptee, scholar, public historian, and community organizer. She founded BGHRA in 2011 after more than a decade of connecting Black Germans, adoptees, families, scholars, and activists across the Atlantic.
Her scholarship explores Black German history, transnational adoption, kinship, diaspora, genealogy, archives, citizenship, and belonging. Her publications appear in English- and German-language scholarly journals and volumes, including Children of the Liberation and Adoption across Race and Nation. Her current book project, The Rekinning, traces Black German adoptees’ lives through migration, family search and reunion, community formation, and archival recovery.
Drawing on her earlier social services work with children and families, developmental psychology, and lived experience, Peña guides BGHRA’s trauma-aware, community-centered approach to scholarly activism: research made accessible and accountable to the communities whose histories it interprets.
Dr. Sonya Donaldson
Executive Director of Media & Archives
Sonya Donaldson is an Assistant Professor of African-American Studies at Colby College. A former journalist and technology editor, she brings experience in storytelling, media, digital humanities, and public-facing scholarship to BGHRA’s archival work. Her research and teaching encompass Black German Studies, Black diaspora studies, African American literature, autobiography and memoir, Black digital cultures, and the relationship between race and technology. She leads the documentation, organization, preservation, and public interpretation of BGHRA’s audiovisual record.
Dr. Emily Frazier-Rath
Executive Director of Education Initiatives
Emily Frazier-Rath is a scholar, educator, editor, and indexer with a Ph.D. in German Studies and additional training in feminist studies, migration, language learning, and cultural studies. She taught German Studies at Davidson College and has developed courses and public programs addressing Black German art, identity, resistance, gender, migration, and contemporary German culture. Her scholarship includes work on Black German FLINTA* community, identity, and connection. At BGHRA, she develops educator and student engagement, teaching initiatives, workshops, and partnerships that bring the diversity of the German-speaking world into classrooms.
Elisabeth Clarke-Hasters
Executive Director of Arts & Culture
Elisabeth Clarke-Hasters is a Black German actor and professionally trained dancer whose career spans film, television, theater, and international performance. Her dance background includes the Dance Theatre of Harlem and work with Pina Bausch and Tanztheater Wuppertal. Her screen work includes Sam – A Saxon, among other German and international productions. Clarke-Hasters brings an artist’s perspective to BGHRA’s cultural programming and leads work that recognizes performance, film, movement, and creative practice as essential forms of Black German knowledge and memory.
Dr. Keith Michael Green
Executive Director of Events & Publications
Keith Michael Green is Associate Professor of English and former chair of Africana Studies at Rutgers University–Camden. His research and teaching include African American literature, nineteenth-century American literature, autobiography, captivity narratives, multilingualism, Afro-Cuban culture, speculative fiction, and disability studies. His books include Bound to Respect and, as co-editor, Diverse Unfreedoms. Green helps connect BGHRA’s work to Rutgers–Camden and guides conference planning, campus engagement, publications, and the association’s broader public-humanities collaborations.
PD Dr. Silke Hackenesch
Executive Director of International Relations
Silke Hackenesch is an Akademische Rätin in the Department of History at the University of Cologne. Her research spans American cultural history, critical race studies, childhood studies, critical adoption studies, Black American history, and Black diaspora studies. She is the editor of Adoption across Race and Nation: US Histories and Legacies and researches the adoption of Black German children within the wider histories of family, race, civil rights, social welfare, citizenship, and the Cold War. Hackenesch strengthens BGHRA’s relationships in Germany and Europe and supports its international scholarly, institutional, and community partnerships.
