Noémie Ndiaye has been named the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.
Ndiaye’s work 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. These reveal crucial processes of racial, gender, and identity formation that have shaped our world. Her book, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2022, dissects the stagecraft used in early modern theater to represent and racialize Africans and Afro-descendants across borders in England, France and Spain.
Ndiaye is the co-editor of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (forthcoming with ACMRS Press in Spring 2023). She has published articles in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass and Thaêtre, as well as essays in many edited collections. She is currently at work on a new monograph tentatively entitled Early Modernity in Black and Brown and on a special anniversary issue of Shakespeare Quarterly.
Ndiaye greatly enjoys collaborating with theater makers and visual artists. She is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Research Board, and co-curator of the forthcoming “Race Before Race” exhibition at the Newberry Library.