Heather Merrill
Professor of Africana Studies, Director of Italian Studies
Heather Merrill's research examines place, race, identity and the social transformation of Europe in relation to the African Diaspora. She is a critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy. Merrill is currently completing a book on anti-blackness and Blackness in Italy and the emergence of Black Spaces. Her book publications are Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (co-edited), 2015; and An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race. She came to Hamilton College from Dickinson College, where she taught and was executive director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. Merrill completed her doctoral work in human geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Recent Courses Taught
Black Europe
Introduction to Africana Studies
Africa in Diaspora: Culture, Identity, Politics
Geographies of Race and Gender
Gender, Race, and Immigration in a Global World
Gender, Space, and Identity in the African Diaspora
Globalization and African Diaspora in Europe
Senior Seminar in Africana Studies
Selected Publications
- Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday, with Lisa M. Hoffman, 2015, University of Georgia Press.
- An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race, 2006, University of Minnesota Press.
- “Postcolonial Borderlands: Black Life Worlds and Relational Place in Turin, Italy,” Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol. 13, Issue 2, 2014. 263-294.
- “Foreword” with Donald Carter. France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardener (Eds). Geographies of Privilege. Routledge, 2013.
- “Who Gets to Be Italian? Black Life Worlds and White Spatial Imaginaries in Turin”, 2013. Chapter 6, in France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardener (Eds). Geographies of Privilege. Routledge, 2013. 135-161.
- “Immigration and Surplus Populations: Race and Deindustrialization in Northern Italy,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography for special issue,“ Bio(necro)polis: Marx, Surplus Populations, and the Spatial Dialectics of Reproduction and ‘Race’,” 2011. Volume 43 (5) 1542-1572.
- “Revisiting Alma Mater: Power and Privilege in Turin,” Themed Book Review: Transnational Feminist Practice: Heather Merrill’s, An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race, Gender, Place and Culture, 14 (6), December 2007.
- “Bordering Humanism: life and death on the margins of Europe,” with Donald Carter, Geopolitics, Volume 12, Issue 2, April 2007. 248-264.
- “Making Space for Anti-Racist Feminism in a Northern Italian Industrial City,” France Winddance Twine and Kathleen Blee eds., Feminism and Anti-Racism: International Struggles, New York University Press, July, 2001.
Professional Affiliations
Association of American Geographers
Specialty Groups: Qualitative Research and Study Group, Geographical Perspectives on
Women, Urban Geography
Appointed to the Faculty
2009Educational Background
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., University of Chicago
M.A., Teachers College, Columbia University
B.A., New York University
