Heidi Ardizzone has served as American Studies department chair from 2015-2021 and has been at Saint Louis University since 2011.  Her publications have focused largely on the historical constructions of race, identity, and racial mixing in the U.S., including the definitive biography of Belle da Costa Greene.  Greene’s significance in the art and rare book worlds is being celebrated in 2024 with the centennial of Manhattan’s Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum.

Since arriving in St. Louis, she has shifted her research to focus on race and civil rights movements in St. Louis and the Midwest.  

Heidi Ardizzone is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University, where she teaches courses on civil rights movements, gender, race and citizenship, St. Louis and the Midwest, visual studies, media and politics, and social movements.  As a Chair, Interim Chair, and Graduate Coordinator since 2015, she has developed public humanities programing and training for MA and PhD students in collaboration with local institutions and professionals. 

She is currently finishing revisions for Mixed Blackness and Civil Rights:  Racial Equality and the Black-White Figure in American Activism from Abolition to Integration, Oxford University Press.  Previous publications include “Generational Activism and Civil Rights Organizing in St. Louis,” in Amanda Izzo and Ben Looker, eds., Left in the Midwest in the 1960s and 1970s, University of Missouri, 2023; “Fatherhood and Father Figures in Barack Obama’s Early Presidency, in Hettie Williams and G. Reginald Daniels, eds., Race and Post-Racialism in the Age of Obama:  A More Perfect Union? 2014; An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege, Norton, 2007; “Catching up with History:  Night of the Quarter Moon, The Rhinelander Case, and Interracial Marriage in 1959,” in Mixed Race Hollywood, 2008, and Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White, Norton, 2001, co-authored with Earl Lewis.