Anne Lafont

Art historian and Professor

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Anne Lafont is an art historian and professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is interested in the art, images, and material culture of France and its colonial empire in the early modern times, as well as in historiographical questions related to the notion of African art. She published a book entitled L’art et la race. L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières which was awarded the 2019 Fetkann Maryse Condé Literary Prize and the 2020 Vitale and Arnold Blokh Prize. Anne Lafont participated, as a member of the scientific committee, in the Musée d’Orsay exhibition The Black Model (2019). For the year 2021-2022, she served as the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College (Mass). Her most recent book, co-edited with François-Xavier Fauvelle, is L’Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle, 2022.