Penn's Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies Society's 2025 Graduate Conference welcomes 14 speakers for four panels on the theme of "Collage."

Constructing Gender and Sexuality through Collage

Constructing and Negotiating Identities

Constructing New Narratives in Postcolonial Times

Constructing Visual Arts

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

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.