Dr Sophie Marie Niang is a writer, teacher and researcher based in North London. She is currently a Lecturer in Cultural Policy at King's College London. Her academic work, sitting at the intersection of black feminist thought, cultural studies, queer of colour critique and black studies, explores practices of worldmaking and refusal across geographic and temporal boundaries. She is currently working on Minor Revolutions, a book about children's resistance forthcoming with Haymarket in 2028.
She has also translated Raphaëlle Red's first novel, Adikou, which will be published by Arboretum Books in November 2026.
Lately
Writing
Haunting in the Undead Empire,Winner of the 2025 Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Essay Prize
Hold Up: The Queer Revolutionary Children of 'Zero for Conduct', Mid Theory
Dolly's Laugh: A Meditation on Recorded Excess (with Ruari Paterson-Achenbach), openworks.
On Flamboyance: Refusal and Worldmaking in Rébecca Chaillon’s Carte noire nommée désir, Modern & Contemporary France
Talks
Refusal, solidarity, and children’s anarchist resistance in Zero for Conduct, LCCT: 20-21 June 2025
Iboga in Fontainebleau: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Hexagon in Seynabou Sonko's Djinns, SFPS Postgraduate Study Day: 23 May 2025.
Upcoming
Talks
Thickening Blackness: Tracing the invention of contemporary black identities in France European University Institute, Florence & online: 27 February 2026.