she|her(s)

Professor
David and Lucile Packard Professor

Feminist & Gender Studies

Heidi R. Lewis is David Lucile Packard Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies, President of the National Women's Studies Association (2023-25), and Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliography in Women's & Gender Studies. Her academic work is primarily focused on Feminist Discourse (emphasis on Black Feminisms), Hip Hop Discourse (emphasis on Rap), and Critical Media Studies.

Her most recent project, “Make Rappers Rap Again!: Interrogating the Mumble Rap ‘Crisis,’” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In it, she contends with the claim that Mumble Rap is not real Hip Hop (or the most authentic or pure Hip Hop), because mumble rappers are ignorant about Hip Hop history, disrespectful toward Hip Hop elders, too similar, unskilled, prone to rapping about nonsense, and too soft or feminine. Some critics have even declared Hip Hop dead (again). Contrarily and perhaps controversially, Lewis argues Mumble Rap is real Hip Hop. Relying primarily on discourse analysis, Lewis examines Mumble Rap’s congruence with oft forgotten or subjugated Hip Hop cornerstones like illegibility, melody, the DJ, and the subgenre, as well as the ways most mumble rappers practice citational and collaborative politics that are congruent with real Hip Hop. She also takes a critical approach to examining the Mumble Rap sound, arguing it is much more complicated than it’s often characterized, especially concerning flow and production. To explain the subjugation of Mumble Rap, Lewis situates the subgenre as southern and examines the ways it challenges dominant notions about real Hip Hop masculinity vis-à-vis attention to the mental and emotional, drug use and addiction, and the fallacies of gender and sexuality norms. Last, but not least, she argues Hip Hop will never die.

Lewis is also working on a documentary about her experiences coming of age in northeast Ohio during the crack cocaine epidemic with Lindumuzi Jabu Ndlovu (Feminist & Gender Studies minor '19). Previously, she published In Audre's Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk, co-edited with Dana Asbury and Jazlyn Andrews (Feminist & Gender Studies '17), for Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winner Sharon Dodua Otoo's Witnessed Series. She has also published in the second volume of Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies, Womanism Rising, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and Unteilbar: Bündnisse gegen Rassismus, and contributed to NewBlackMan, NPR, Ms., KRCC, Bitch, and Act Out. She has given talks at Vanderbilt, the Gender and the Brain Conference, the University of Georgia, the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, Portland State, the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Kampagne für Opfer Rassistischer Polizeigewalt, and many other organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Berlin.

Last, but certainly not least, Lewis is a proud native of Alliance, OH. She currently resides in Colorado Springs with her husband of more than two decades, Tony; their children Junior and Chase; their dog Philly; and their cat D’Brickashaw “Brick” Ferguson.

Courses

In addition to departmental core courses (e.g., FG200 Feminist Theory and FG416 Senior Seminar), Dr. Lewis teaches the following:

• FG240 Hip Hop & Feminism
• FG242 Hip Hop on Film
• FG212 Critical Media Studies
• FG214 Hidden Spaces, Hidden Narratives: Intersectionality Studies in Berlin (study abroad)
• FG312 Black Feminist Theory
• FG316 Critical Race Feminism
• FG344 Hip Hop & the Law