Tiffany N. Florvil
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Spring 2023

Tiffany Florvil is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico who focuses on social movements, gender and sexuality, emotions, and the African diaspora in modern Europe. She received her BA from Florida State University, MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and PhD from the University of South Carolina. Her book Mobilizing Black Germany: Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Illinois, 2020) explores the emergence of the Black German movement of the 1980s and 1990s and traces the evolution of a Black German activist tradition inspired by Caribbean-American feminist poet Audre Lorde. Florvil co-edited Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories (Peter Lang, 2018). She co-chairs the Black Diaspora Studies Network of German Studies Association, co-founded and edits H-Emotions, serves on the editorial board of Central European History, and has published in the German Quarterly, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the American Council on Germany, German Academic Exchange Service, and German Historical Institute, among others.

Project Description

May Ayim’s “Community” Speaks Out

In Berlin, Florvil will work on an intellectual biography of May Ayim (1960-1996), who became one of the most important Black German thinkers, poets, and activists of the postwar period. In her short life, Ayim navigated in her writing the racism she encountered as an Afro-German child and adult, stressed the importance of reckoning with the legacy of colonialism, and explored her family histories in Ghana and Germany. Inspired in part by Audre Lorde and other Afro-German women she met in Berlin and elsewhere, helping to forge the political and cultural foundation for the Black German movement of the 1980s. Together with Katharina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schultz, she edited the groundbreaking 1986 anthology “Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte.” Ayim also fashioned her own intergenerational, horizontally-rooted “family” by connecting with individuals near and far. “These relationships open up new ways to understand racial intimacy and radical kinship in the everyday,” writes Florvil, who plans to develop an innovative approach that complicates notions of race, gender, and identity in Europe, and also to show Ayim’s relevance to German social justice movements to better understand today’s global Black Lives Matter movements. In Berlin, Florvil will conduct archival research at the Freie Universität and elsewhere and deepen partnerships with scholars, artists, activists, and community organizations such as Each One Teach One and Oguntoye’s Joliba.

Academy Activities

26 Apr 23
Black Radical Histories Black Studies

Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture

Black Radical Histories

Tiffany Florvil discusses Black radical actors in Germany who advanced politics and showed Germany was a key hub for the transnational Black diaspora.

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16 May 23
The Writings of May Ayim Black Studies

Anna-Maria Kellen Lecture

The Writings of May Ayim

Tiffany Florvil explores what poet and activist May Ayim meant to her friends and peers.

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22 Mar 23

Fellow Spotlight: Tiffany N. Florvil

Tiffany Florvil is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico, where she focuses on social movements, gender and sexuality, emotions, and the African diaspora in modern Europe. In Berlin, Florvil is working on an intellectual biography of May Ayim (1960-96), who became one of ...

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16 May 23

The Writings of May Ayim

Black German activist and intellectual May Ayim (1960-96) produced a wide-ranging corpus of writing—poetry, prose, political tracts—that enabled her to theorize, share her experiences, and circulate knowledge. In this talk, Tiffany Florvil explores how Ayim’s literary and political work engage ...

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