Fred Constant teaches Comparative Politics, Public Policy Analysis and Governance at the University of Antilles and Guyane, where he served as vice-president for international affairs (1997-2001). He is currently Cultural attaché at the French embassy in Mauritius and an occasional lecturer on Citizenship and Governance in Plural Post-colonial Societies (Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, Mauritius, Jamaica, Porto Rico) at the University of Mauritius.
He has been a professor of political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Strasbourg, France as well as a research fellow at the European University Institute where he participated in the 1995-6 European forum on Citizenship directed by professors Klaus Eder (Humbold Univ. Berlin) Steven Lukes (Balliol College Oxford) and Massimo La Torre (Univ. Bologna Italy). In 2001, he was appointed invited professor at the University of New York (Institute of French Studies) www.nyu.edu where he taught “minority politics in France”. Along with Peter Sahlins (UC Berkeley) and James C. Scott (Yale Univ.), he then co-directed an American Council for Learned Societies. He has also done international, interdisciplinary collaborative research network on “Official and Vernacular Identifications in the Making of the Modern World”. In 2003, he was appointed by former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali as provost of the Leopold Sedar Senghor International University of Alexandria where he set up a pluri-annual research program about democracy and development. In 2005, he was co-convenor of the first-ever academic conference, organized at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, on “Les Noirs en France : Anatomie d’un groupe invisible” (Blacks in France : anatomy of an invisible group).
His research interests include surrounding issues of citizenship, ethnicity, equality, intersecting forms of discrimination, politics and policies of antidiscrimination, narratives of raced-based identity, color-blindness and rhetoric of diversité. Author of several books and articles, he has recently co-authored the influential Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions (Memories of the Slave Trade, of Slavery and of their abolitions), which led to President Chirac’s historic decision to break through this – so far – silenced and traumatic side of France’s national past.
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Please click here to read Professor Constant’s Bellagio Abstract
