Anne Lafont
Professor, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Dr. Anne Lafont is a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the 2025 Visiting Professor for the TORCH/Princeton University Press Lecture Series in European History and Culture. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century art and visual culture in the transatlantic world, Lafont's research focuses on early modern art and material culture in France and its colonial empire, as well as contemporary art, Blackness, and diasporic Africa. Her publications include L’artiste savant à la conquête du monde moderne, 1740, un abrégé du monde—Savoirs et collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville, and L’art et la race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières, which received the Prix Littéraire Fetkann Maryse Condé and the Prix Vitale et Arnold Blokh. She was recently awarded a Villa Albertine fellowship (Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S.) and currently serves as the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College.
