CONTRIBUTOR:

Frieda Ekotto

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Professor

DEPARTMENT:

Afroamerican and African Studies

INSTITUTION:

University of Michigan

BIOGRAPHY:

Frieda Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literatures and in the cinema of West Africa and its diaspora, she concentrates on law, race and LGBTQIA2S+ issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. She is the author of multiple books, numerous book chapters, and many articles in prestigious literary journals. In addition to her academic work, she is a creative writer. She received the Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical Literature in 2014, and in 2015 she was awarded the Benezet Award for excellence in her field. In 2016, she was awarded the John H. D’Arms Faculty for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Degree at Colorado College. She has produced two documentaries in 2017 Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters and in 2020 Zurura Zurura: A Smile Blooms as part of the ongoing research on Vibrancy of Silence: Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women.