Mame-Fatou Niang
Director and Founder, CBESA
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Mame-Fatou Niang is a professor of Global French Studies and the Founder/Director of the Center for Black European Studies & the Atlantic at 麻豆村. She is the author of Identités Françaises (Brill, 2019) and the co-author of Universalisme (Anamosa, 2022). Her recent research examines Black geographies, Blackness in France and the institutionalization of Black Studies.
Dr. Niang is the international curator of the Rio de Janeiro Literary Festival (FLUP), and an artist-in-residence at Ateliers Médicis in Paris, working on a project entitled “Échoïques” (Sounds of Silence). She is a member of the Black|France|Noire Collective and the co-founder of the Global Network for the Studies of Africans and People of African Descent (G-SAP).
In 2015, Dr. Niang co-directed “Mariannes Noires: Mosaïques Afropéennes” with Kaytie Nielsen, a sophomore in her French class. The film follows seven Afro-French women as they investigate the pieces of their mosaic identities, and unravel what it means to be Black and French, Black in France. She served as the Melodia Jones Distinguished Chair of French Studies at University at Buffalo in Fall 2021, and as Distinguished Visiting Professor in French Studies at Columbia University in Fall 2024.
Dr. Niang has collaborated with Slate, Jacobin, and several news outlets in France. She is currently working on two manuscripts: Mosaica Nigra: Blackness in 21st-century France and Alice Diop : French Cinema and the Double Vague.
Education
- Ph.D., Louisiana State University (USA), French and Francophone Studies
- M.A., Université Lyon II (France), Anglophone Studies
- B.A., Université Lyon II(France), Licence, English and Urban Planning