Prof Françoise Vergès
BA Women's Studies and Political Science; MA Political Science; PhD, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley (USA).
Prof Vergès (Reunion Island/France) is a Paris-based political theorist; an antiracist feminist activist; a public educator; an independent curator; filmmaker and director. Vergès is currently Senior Fellow Researcher at the Sarah Parker Centre for the Study of Race and Racialization, University College, London (UK) and is holding the 2025 Banister Fletcher Fellowship for herr project “Imagining the Post-Museum”. Vergès has held positions as Professor of Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah (UAE); Consulting Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK); Visiting Professor at Grinnell College, Iowa (USA); and Distinguished Visitor at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, Rhode Island (USA).
Vergès is globally considered as a leading feminist of colour, scholar, curator, film director and ‘artivist’. Her wide-ranging transdisciplinary academic and artivist work focuses on multiple practices of resistance; the afterlives of slavery, colonisation and imperialism; relationships between climate catastrophe and racism; decolonisation of the western museum; decolonial feminism; the ‘post-museum’ and the politics of dispossession and racialisation. Vergès’s work draws on decolonial psychoanalysis, visual, sonic and literary elements, as well as feminist, postcolonial, anticolonial and radical theories. Vergès’s latest book, Making the world Clean. Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (Goldsmiths, 2024) was released in December 2024.
As an artivist, Vergès was curator for the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery at Nantes, France; a co-founder of the Decolonize the Arts collective (2015-2020) and creator of L’Atelier - a workshop and public performance with artists and activists. In 1996, Vergès worked with renowned Black British artist Isaac Julien on the film Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks and curated the exhibition ‘The Slave in Le Louvre. An Invisible Humanity’ (2016) and was project advisor for the Platform 3 ‘Créolité and Creolization at documenta11 (2002) and the Triennale de Paris (2011) curated by Okwui Enwezor. Vergès has directed films on Aimé Césaire (2013) and Maryse Condé (2011).