she|her(s)

Professor
David and Lucile Packard Professor

Feminist & Gender Studies

Heidi R. Lewis is David Lucile Packard Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Gender & Women's Studies Studies. Her work is primarily focused on Feminism (emphasis Black Feminism), Hip Hop (emphasis Rap), and Media Studies.

Her most recent project, Make Rappers Rap Again!: Interrogating the Mumble Rap "Crisis” (August 2025) is the first to be published in the Oxford University Press Theorizing African American Music Series. In it, Lewis contends with the claim that Mumble Rap is not real Hip Hop (or the most authentic or pure), because mumble rappers are ignorant about Hip Hop history, disrespectful toward old heads (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, she 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 congruent with real Hip Hop. She also takes a critical approach to examining the Mumble Rap sound, arguing it's 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; 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; and features an interview with DJ Drama. Last, but not least, she argues Hip Hop will never die.

Previously, Lewis published In Audre's Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk, co-edited with Dana Asbury and Jazlyn Andrews (Feminist & Gender Studies '17), in 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 Germany. From 2023-25, Lewis served as the 22nd elected President of the National Women's Studies Association.

Last, but certainly not least, Lewis is a proud native of the Midwest—Northeast Ohio, to be precise; Alliance, OH, to be exact. Since joining the Colorado College faculty in 2010 as a Riley Scholar-in-Residence Dissertation Fellow, Lewis has resided in Colorado Springs with her husband, children, and fur babies.

Courses

In addition to departmental core courses (e.g., FG110 Introduction to Feminist & Gender Studies, FG200 Feminist Theory, and FG416 Senior Seminar), Lewis regularly teaches:

• FG212 Critical Media Studies
• FG214 Hidden Spaces, Hidden Narratives: Intersectionality Studies in Berlin (study abroad)
• FG226 Black Feminist Media Studies
• FG228 Black Feminist Literary Criticism
• FG240 Hip Hop & Feminism
• FG242 Hip Hop on Film
• FG312 Black Feminist Theory
• FG344 Hip Hop & the Law