Tiffany N. Florvil

Tiffany N. Florvil is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She is a 20th century cultural historian of Germany whose work focuses on African/Black diasporic communities, internationalism, race, gender, and sexuality. Her work centers on Black Germans and their creation of new intellectual, cultural, and political practices.

At Radcliffe, Florvil is working on a manuscript about the life of May Ayim, among the most important Black German thinkers and writers of her generation. She examines the international intellectuals in Ayim’s orbit, including the British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, the South African feminist Ellen Kuzwayo, and the British publisher John La Rose. Florvil argues that these relationships moved beyond bloodlines, allowing us to better understand the contours of racial intimacy and radical kinship. Analyzing these relationships, she also reveals how Ayim’s internationalism manifested itself in the everyday exchanges and practices that she maintained with her community in and beyond Berlin.

She received her doctorate in modern European history from the University of South Carolina. She is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and essays and three books, most recently, Black Germany-Schwarz, deutsch, feministisch-die Geschichte einer Bewegung (Ch. Links Verlag, 2023), a German translation, and Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies 2020 Book Prize, among other honors. She has received support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the American Academy in Berlin, and others.