is a PhD candidate in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her project, titled Black Diasporic Temporalities (of the City), seeks to examine Black diasporic experiences and artistic reproductions of time as they cluster around the metropolitan centres of London and Berlin. This work is derived from the question: How much time does it take to be Black in an environment characterised by imperialism and its racist continuities?
As an early member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, she began to catalogue the hours spent engaging with issues of racism as they arose, or rather, sustained themselves within academic spaces, before giving up (in horror). As a part of the group, Fenja has both participated in the facilitation of, and drawn support from the community cultivated by the Union.
Alongside this, they collaborated on the film “Oil on Water” (2021), a contemplation on Berlin as ‘home’ for its Black inhabitants. As a student assistant at the Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (DeZIM) she supplied edits for Revisualising Intersectionality (2022) by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne.
(Research) interests include, postcolonialism, queer theory, the intersections of race and sexuality, memes and their afterlives, pop-culture more broadly, and diverse strategies of Black survival and resistance as they relate to the above.
Contact: fenja.a.hummel@hu-berlin.de
