Mame-Fatou Niang

Director and Founder, CBESA

Bio

Mame-Fatou Niang is the Director of the Center for Black European Studies at the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon University. She is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies in CMU's Department of Modern Languages, the author of Identités Françaises (Brill, 2019) and the co-author of Universalisme (Anamosa, 2022). She conducts research on economies of the living/living economy, Blackness in Contemporary France, and French Universalism.

Niang is an Artist-in-Residence at the Ateliers Médicis in Paris, working on a project entitled “Échoïques” (Sounds of Silence).

In 2015, 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. In 2021, she served as the Melodia Jones Distinguished Chair of French Studies at University at Buffalo.

Niang has collaborated with Slate, Jacobin, and several news outlets in France. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Mosaica Nigra: Blackness in 21st-century France.

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