Rosemarie Peña

Rosemarie Peña (born 1956) is a German-born American adoption scholar and community organizer whose work focuses on Black German history, transnational adoption, displaced childhoods, and adoptee family reunification. She founded the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) in 2011 and serves as its president.

Early life and education

Peña was born in Viernheim, West Germany, in 1956 and was adopted in Germany by an African American U.S. Army family, who brought her to the United States. She spent part of her childhood in Willingboro, New Jersey. As an adult she recovered records relating to her birth and adoption and reconnected with members of her family of origin.

Peña earned bachelor's degrees in psychology and German studies and later completed a Ph.D. in childhood studies. Her doctoral and subsequent research brought together childhood studies, adoption studies, Black German studies, critical race theory, and feminist studies.

Career and scholarship

Before entering academia, Peña worked as a social worker with traumatized young people and later in digital and web-based work. She used online networks to connect members of the international Black German community. In 2009, Spiegel Online reported that she had expanded the Black German Cultural Society from an email list into a website and social network connecting members on both sides of the Atlantic. She served as vice president and president of the Black German Cultural Society between 2000 and 2011 and founded BGHRA in 2011.

Chicago-area newspapers covered Peña's public-education work on Black German history and the Holocaust. In 2005, South Shore Community News reported on her presentation at DuSable High School for the student project "Germany's Black Holocaust: Tell the Whole Truth"; the following year, the Wednesday Journal profiled her ahead of talks at schools and the Oak Park Public Library. In 2012, The Philadelphia Inquirer profiled Peña and her community work in a front-page feature.

Peña's research examines the history and experiences of Black German children adopted by families in the United States after the Second World War, including their later searches for relatives and the formation of transnational adoptee communities. Her article "From Both Sides of the Atlantic" analyzed the newsletters and online forum created by German-born adoptee William Gage as records of search, reunion, and community formation. In a 2018 field survey published in Adoption & Culture, scholar Cynthia Callahan grouped Peña with Kori Graves and Sarah Trembanis, writing that their research revealed African Americans as active agents in creating adoptive families and emphasized their place in American adoption history and culture. Historian Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria has identified Peña's testimony, together with Daniel Cardwell's, as a means of understanding the individual lives of Afro-German Americans sent from Germany to the United States.

Her approach combines archival research with the accounts of adoptees and community members. In a University of British Columbia interview, Peña described this community-centered approach as "scholarly activism" and argued that research involving vulnerable communities should be beneficial rather than extractive. Her 2020 dissertation, The Rekinning: Portraying Postwar Black German Transnational Adoption, analyzed representations of Black German adoption in documentary films. She has taught in the German Studies program at the University of British Columbia and has been affiliated with Rutgers University–Camden. In April 2024, Peña presented "Rekinning & Reculturation: Transcultural Adoption and the Black Diaspora" on the "From War to Adoption: Transnational Journeys" panel at Northwestern University's conference Korean Adoption and Its Global Legacies: 70 Years and Beyond.

Through BGHRA, Peña has organized international conferences and public programs bringing together scholars, artists, filmmakers, activists, and members of the Black German diaspora. Her work also addresses "re-kinning": the efforts of transnational adoptees to restore connections with birth families, cultural communities, and historical archives.

External links

• Black German Heritage and Research Association
• Rosemarie Peña on ResearchGate