Frieda Ekotto
President
Frieda Ekotto was elected second vice president of the MLA in December 2020. Her term as president runs from January 2023 through January 2024. She has previously served on the Publications Committee of the MLA.
Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, and Afroamerican and American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been teaching at Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, during her summers. She received her PhD in French and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Her research interests include twentieth-century narratives and sub-Saharan African cinema, European intellectual history and philosophy, postcolonialism, film, writing and violence, legal discourse and literature, psychoanalysis and sociological approaches, critical discourse and cultural studies, French and francophone literatures, narratives of francophone women writers, West African and francophone cinema, North African women writers, and questions of silence and translation.
Her book publications include Race and Sex across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical, and Theater Discourse (2011). She is the coeditor of Rethinking African Cultural Production (2015) and Rethinking Third Cinema: The Role of Anti-colonial Media and Aesthetics in Postmodernity (2009). Ekotto edited Nimrod: Selected Writings (2018) and is the author of Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bon Mbella, which was translated by Corine Tachtiris. She is also the author of dozens of scholarly articles in English and French.
Ekotto is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the French government.