Dr. Rosemarie Peña is the founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA). In this role, she has co-produced and hosted four international academic conferences on Black German studies. A fifth conference planned for April 2020 at Rutgers-Camden was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rosemarie earned bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and German and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. Her research explores displaced childhoods with a special focus on the historical and contemporary intersections of transnational adoption and child migration. Her dissertation, The Rekinning: Portraying Postwar Black German Transnational Adoption, is a discourse analysis of two historical documentary films.

Rosemarie has presented at numerous conferences and is a frequently invited keynote speaker internationally. She is a contributing author in several edited volumes published in both German and English. Her peer reviewed articles have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood, Genealogy Journal, and the Journal of Adoption and Culture. Rosemarie’s most recent essay, “Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s)” is included in Marion Kraft’s edited volume Children of the Liberation: Transatlantic Experiences and Perspectives of Black Germans of the Post-War Generation in 2019.