Noémie Ndiaye
Associate Professor of early modern English and French Literatures at the University of Chicago
Academic Biography
Noémie Ndiaye is an Associate Professor of early modern English and French Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and she received her Ph.D. in Theatre from Columbia University.
She works on early modern English, French, and Spanish drama, theater, and performance culture with a critical focus on race, as well as gender and sexuality. In her research, writing, and teaching, she explores the relation between theater—understood simultaneously as a medium, a practice, an industry, an institution, a social force, and a vibrant malleable set of literary forms—and the social, political, and cultural struggles of early modernity. At the core of those struggles and of her interests lay crucial processes of racial, gender, and identity formation, which she studies in a comparative and transnational framework. Balancing meticulous historicization with transhistorical theoretical insights, Ndiaye’s scholarship is at the intersection of early modern literary studies, critical race studies, theater and performance studies, and comparative literature.
“I see early modern European theatre and performance culture at large as powerful sites for the making of racial formations that shaped our world. I seek to illuminate early modern performance culture in all its vibrancy as a force field where coalescing ideologies and competing ideas of race met embodied fiction. As they did so, they found their way into European minds and hearts in the age of nascent capitalism, colonization, and color-based slavery. I want to understand how the beautiful fables that made humans in the age of humanism also made monsters.”
Ndiaye’s multi-award-winning first monograph, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press 2022), shows how performance culture helped strategically turn blackness into a racial category across early modern Western Europe. Ndiaye’s second monograph, The Whiteness Between Us: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (Fall 2026). It examines how early modern English, French, and Spanish theatre interpolated Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous, Romani, and Asian characters into dramaturgies of racial blackness, to argue that those interpolations enabled plays to define or refine the positioning of those non-Black characters of color (and the offstage communities they stood) for vis-à-vis whiteness, thereby locating whiteness at the center of an aspirational global architecture of power relations. Ndiaye is currently at work on her monograph, Dark Times: Shakespeare, Race, and Temporal Affect, based upon the Wells Shakespeare Lectures that she will deliver at Oxford University in 2027.
Ndiaye has published many articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass, Thaêtre, Bulletin of the Comediantes, and in various edited collections. She is the co-editor with Lia Markey of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World (ACMRS Press 2023), which explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the world from 1300 to 1800. This book won the 2024 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers in the “Art Exhibitions” category and it is available in Open Access here.
“Because early modernity saw the rise of nation-state formation and a literary Golden Age in many European countries, texts from that period play a special role: in those fables, which are still performed on stage today, collective imagination, reflected in syllabi and cultural politics, begins to define national identity. I seek to open up those definitions by locating a Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) presence in early modern European culture, and by showing that interracial negotiations, white supremacist leanings, and minoritarian resistance to those leanings have been part of European identity from its inception.”
Noémie Ndiaye’s faculty profile webpage at the University of Chicago.
Contact: ndiaye@uchicago.edu
Full academic Curriculum Vitae available upon request.