Trica Keaton
Professor
Appointments
Evans Family Distinguished Professor
Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, French Institute for Advanced Study (FIAS/IAS - Iméra) 2024-25
Faculty Affiliations- Departments of Sociology and Film & Media Studies
Area of Expertise
I invite you to read my brief bio.
Biography
I am a professor and interdisciplinary social scientist whose research and teaching examine evidence-based responses to enduring societal questions—most notably, what it has meant to be racialized-as-black and non-black (intentionally lowercase) in the U.S., France, Europe, and beyond. I explore both the consequences of this longstanding process of racialization and the ways individuals and communities have resisted—and refused—those consequences.
Throughout my professional journey, I have organized conferences, symposia, film screenings, and public events at universities where I have been a faculty member and in France, contributing to the growth of Black French and European Studies within U.S. academia. I have also been recognized with several competitive awards and fellowships, including the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship of the French Institute for Advanced Study (FIAS) and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS–Iméra) at Aix-Marseille University; several internal awards and support at Dartmouth, including the Scholarly Innovation and Advancement Award; and support from the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center at Villa Serbelloni in Italy, the Ford Foundation, Columbia University's Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, and the Chateaubriand Fellowship, which holds special significance as the first major competitive fellowship that I received as a doctoral student to conduct research in France.
These experiences have informed my teaching, including in my Afro/Black Paris study away program, which offers students an immersive exploration of the African diaspora in Paris and other regions in France: "The Black Experience in the City of Light." I am also developing a short film and augmented reality heritage app, titled Digital Black Paris©, which maps the hidden histories of Black Americans in Paris.
Education
University of California, Berkeley: Ph.D. with distinction - Education (Sociology of Education and African Diaspora Studies), 2001
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France: Doctoral Studies in Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles: M.A. - Applied Linguistics (Language Policy and Immigration in France)
Middlebury College: M.A. - French
University of California, Los Angeles: B.A. - Linguistics and French
Publications
My publications include both articles and books (monographs & edited volumes):
#You Know You're Black in France When...: The Fact of Everyday Antiblackness (MIT Press)
--Selected as a 2023 Choice Pick by the Association of College and Research Libraries (a division of the American Library Association)
--Shortlisted for the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award
Black France / France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (co-edited, Duke University Press)
Black Europe and the African Diaspora (co-edited, University of Illinois Press)
Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Indiana University Press)
My current book project, Real to Reel: Racialized Representations and French Banlieue Cinéma, takes up the above questions as they unfold in French cinema and France's film industry.
Selected Articles and Other Publications
"Why are French Authorities acknowledging racial profiling but doing nothing about it?" Contexts (Sociology for the Public), January 12, 2024
"Race," in Keywords for African American Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2018): 163-167
"Au Nègre Joyeux: Everyday Anti-blackness Guised as Public Art," Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art (2016): 52-58
"Review of Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe" by Michael McEachrane (ed), The Black Scholar 46, no. 1 (2016): 77-80
"Racial Profiling and the 'French Exception.'" French Cultural Studies, 24, no. 2 (2013): 231-242
"Euzhan Palcy: Creative Dissent, Artistic Reckoning—An Interview by Trica Danielle Keaton," Palimpsest (2012): 116-134
"Racial Profiling: France and the U.S." (part 1 and part 2), Racism Review, 2012
"The Defiant One: Euzhan Palcy," Feminist Wire, 2011
"The Politics of Race-Blindness: (Anti)blackness and Category Blindness in Contemporary France," Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 7, no.1 (2010): 103-131
"'Black (American) Paris' and the 'Other France': The Race Question and Questioning Solidarity," In Black Europe and the African Diaspora, eds. D. Clark Hine, T. Keaton, and S. Small, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009)
"Black Paris/Paris Noir," in Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, (Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO Press/Greenwood Publishing, 2008): 187-188
"Review of Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image by Bennetta Jules-Rosette," Journal of American Studies, 42, no. 2 (2008): 2
"Arrogant Assimilationism: National Identity Politics and African Origin Muslim Girls in the Other France," Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36, no. 4 (2005): 405-423
"Un Regard Afro-américain sur une 'Cité' de la Banlieue Parisienne : Les Courtillières," Agone: Sociologie, Histoire & Politique, 29-30 (2003) : 121-134
"Review of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World by Manthia Diawara," African Studies Review, 46, no 3 (2003): 175-176
"Muslim Girls and the 'Other France': An Examination of Identity Construction," Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 5, no. 1 (1999): 47-64
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