conveners

Arlette Frund is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the Université François-Rabelais-Tours, France. She specializes in African American literature and culture. She is the author of: Phillis Wheatley et Olaudah Equiano : Figures pionnières de la diaspora atlantique (2006) ; she has edited BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, vol. 9.2 (2004), co-edited “La couleur du temps dans la culture afro-américaine,” Cahiers de recherches afro-américaines Transversalité, vol.1 (Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais 2005), and “Ecritures de l’histoire africaine-américaine”, Annales du monde anglophone, vol. 18 (2003). In 2006, she was the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and remains an Associate of the Du Bois Institute. She organizes conferences and symposia for the Center for African American and Diaspora Studies (CEAAD) in Paris. With the Du Bois Institute, she planned the following conferences “African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches: a conference in honor of Geneviève and Michel Fabre” at the Sorbonne in December 2004, and the 50th Anniversary of the 1st International Congress of Black Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in September 2006.

Trica Danielle Keaton is an Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, France (2009-2010), and she has been a visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France and a former Chateaubriand Fellow. She is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Foreword by Manthia Diawara, 2006), a multi-year ethnography situated in the impoverished Parisian outer-cities that documents shifting national identity and “race” politics in contemporary France, co-editor with Darlene Clark Hine and Stephen Small of Black Europe and the African Diaspora (2009) containing her chapter “‘Black (American) Paris’ and the French Outer-Cities: The Race Question and Questioning Solidarity,” and co-editor with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall of the forthcoming anthology: Black France-France Noire: Blackness, Diaspora, and National Identity Politics (Foreword by Christiane Taubira), and its French translation with Fred Constant. She has also organized and co-organized a number of conferences on the African diaspora in Europe and the US, including, most recently, the “France Noire – Black France” conference mentioned earlier in this document. She is currently working on her next book, (Anti) Blackness in French Society.

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is a Distinguished Professor of French and African American and Diaspora Studies and Director of the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Negritude Women (2002), Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (1999), and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998). She has edited or coedited seven volumes, the latest of which are: Beyond Negritude: Paulette Nardal and Essays from Femme dans la Cité and The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. She has recently completed an award-winning book on young black women and hip-hop culture, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women (2007). She is currently at work on Bricktop’s Paris, a multi-life biography of African American women in Paris in the Jazz Age.

Maboula Soumahoro has been a visiting lecturer in Africana Studies at Barnard College and at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University (New York). She received her Ph.D. magna cum laude from the English department of the Universite de Tours Francois-Rabelais (France). She has also been a Visiting Scholar in the History department and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. She has lectured and delivered papers in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. Her research focuses on the African Diaspora (the Americas and Europe) and American Black Nationalisms (19th and 20th centuries). Her publications include a book chapter in the African Diaspora and the Study of Religion, edited by Theodore Trost (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and an article inTransition (98, 2008). She is currently working on Black European Studies and organized an international symposium, "Constructing Black France: A Transatlantic Dialogue", held on Barnard and Columbia campuses in April 2009. She is now Assistant Professor in the English department of the Universty François-Rabelais in Tours, France, where she is a member of the Groupe de Recherche Anglo-Américaine de Tours (GRAAT).