Niang Receives William H. and Frances S. Ryan Award for Meritorious Teaching

Mame-Fatou Niang, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director-Founder of the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic (CBESA), Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Since her arrival at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012, Mame-Fatou Niang’s expertise on the Francophone world and dedication to education have manifested as ground-breaking projects, a first-of-its-kind center launching with a conference this month and powerful courses.

Kaytie Nielsen (BHA 2016) recalled how meeting Niang fundamentally shaped her creative and professional trajectories. Nielsen and Niang worked together on “Mariannes Noires,” a documentary on Afro-French womanhood that began as a senior honors thesis and continues to make an impact.

“Dr. Niang inspired me to ask tough questions, pushed me to explore with courage and kindness and trusted me to work with her on a film that addressed a major gap in French media, a project that has certainly changed my life,” Nielsen said.

Niang bridges her scholarship and her teaching practice. Margaret Gerlach, a graduate student in the M.A. in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition program noted how Niang’s appreciation of student contributions inform her teaching practices.

“At the core of Dr. Niang’s research is a focus on education,” Gerlach said. “Many assignments in her class involved creating some form of instructional material, and she would often come into class and tell us that she had shared our work with a colleague in Paris, Amsterdam, Boston or one of many other various locations for them to use with their students. Not only did this make us feel valued and proud of our contributions to the field, but it also helped to inform educational practices elsewhere, allowing other educators to teach the next group of students about the topic.”

Niang’s lessons are transferable to all students regardless of their major. Louis Plottel (ENG 2021) remembers the three courses he took with Niang in the Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics as the highlights of his time at CMU.

“As an engineering student, it was really enjoyable to take classes in a distinctly non-STEM discipline taught by a professor at the forefront of her field,” Plottel said. “The energy, passion and intellect Dr. Niang brought to the classroom, combined with the innovative ways she wove in the works of others in her field made her classes some of the best I have taken at CMU, and I know many of her other former students feel the same. Her courses left a lasting and positive impact on my development, both personally and professionally.”