Heather Merrill
Professor of Africana Studies, Director of Italian Studies
Heather Merrill’s research examines place, race, belonging, and blackness in Europe. A critical human geographer and cultural anthropologist who worked with Allan Pred at UC Berkeley, her theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy. Merrill’s co-authored work in progress is Black European Futures. Her essay “Afro Italian (be)longings and Innocent Betrayals” (2025) for Oxford University Press examines Black aesthetic spaces. Her book Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy (Routledge 2018), is a non-reified social cultural analysis and mapping of lived experiences in the everyday through the framework of what she calls Black/black spaces.
Merrill co-edited Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation, University of Georgia 2015). Her monograph, An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (University of Minnesota 2006) is one of the first ethnographies to address intersectional discrimination. Merrill came to Hamilton as Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor of Critical Feminist and Black Geographies from Dickinson College, where she taught and was the first woman executive director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.
Recent Courses Taught
Afro-Futures: Decolonial Present
Black Europe
Representation, Culture and Power
Gender, Space and Identity: Intersections
Racism and Anti-Racism
Geographies of Race and Gender
Gender, Race and Globalization
Senior Seminar in Africana Studies
Selected Publications
- “Afro Italian (Be)longings and Innocent Betrayals” for Racism by Context, ed. By Patricia Daley. Oxford Intersections Program, Oxford University Press. March 2025.
- “Being Italian: The Peculiar Journey of Blackness,” ‘Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racism, and Collective Amnesia,’ Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography. Volume 5, Issue 2: 165-178, 2023.
- “Silence and Reckoning: African-Italians in Popular Culture”, “Special issue: Diversity, Decolonization, and Italian Studies,” Italian Studies in South Africa. VOL. 35 No.1, 89-111, 2022.
- Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy. New York: Routledge, 2018.
- Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday. Merrill, Heather and Lisa Hoffman eds., Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series, University of Georgia Press. 2015.
- An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
- Co-Editor Special Issue, “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racism, and Collective Amnesia,” Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography. Co-edited with Katharyne Mitchell and Lisa M. Hoffman, Volume 5: Issue 2: 2023.
- “Wake Up: The Urgent Appeal of Allan Pred,” Introduction to Special Issue in Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography. Co-authored with Katharyne Mitchell and Lisa M. Hoffman, March 2023. Volume 5: Issue 2: 117-124, 2023.
- “In Other Wor(l)ds: Situated Intersectionality in Italy” in Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday, Heather Merrill and Lisa Hoffman eds. 77-100, 2015.
- “Postcolonial Borderlands: Black Life Worlds and Relational Place in Turin, Italy,” Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol. 13, Issue 2, 63-294, 2014.
- “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,” Chapter 6, in France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardener (Eds). Geographies of Privilege. Routledge, 135-161, 2013.
- “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’,” 43 (5) 1542-1572, 2011.
- “Bordering Humanism: life and death on the margins of Europe,” with Donald Carter, GeoPolitics, Volume 12, Issue 2, 248-264, April 2007.
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
