Mohamed Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy and Intellectual History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After teaching at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, he joined Brown University. He holds the chair of Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities. He is the author of The States of the Earth which examines how the disenchantment of empires led to the Anthropocene during the 19th century. The book won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023, was published in English in April 2024 by Verso Books and is currently under translation in Japanese.
His second book was published in French in 2023. It is titled: Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (Alongside Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology) which is under translation in English, Japanese and Italian. The book is a philosophical engagement with some conceptual assumptions of "the ontological turn", with a focus on French anthropological structuralism. The book provoked an ongoing conversation between anthropology and philosophy
Mohamed Amer Meziane published in the following peer-reviewed academic journals: Political Theology (with a response by Talal Asad), Review of Middle East Studies (RoMes), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CESAAME), Critical Times, Qui Parle?, Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Association for Continental Philosophy, Philosophy Today, SubStance, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Review of the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR), Raisons politiques, Socio-Anthropologie, Le Journal des anthropologues, Multitudes, Les Temps qui restent (ex-Les Temps Modernes), among others. He recently contributed to the Oxford Companion to Cosmopolitanism edited by Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sanjay Seth, Lisa Wedeen (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).
His work reaches both an Academic and non-Academic audiences in Europe and Africa, with talks at Harvard University, MIT, The Collège de France, ENS Paris Ulm, Sorbonne University, MoMa PS1, LuMA, The Night of Ideas in New York and Dakar as well as Universities in Tunisia and Morocco. His books have been reviewed by figures such as Etienne Balibar on the Verso blog as well as in several media such as Le Monde, Mediapart and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. A short interview-documentary on his work was made by the European television channel Arte.
At Brown University, Mohamed Amer Meziane on Global Critical Theory by connecting both Western and non-Western canons. His seminars focus on anticolonial thought, Hegelianism and Marxisms, Continental Philosophy, Afro-Arab Contemporary Theory, History and Literature with a focus on the French-speaking canon in the Maghreb and the Caribbean.
He is currently working on a new book manuscript titled The Sacrifice of Heaven (Le sacrifice du ciel, Paris, Le Seuil, 2026). It deploys a historical anthropology of 19th century continental philosophy and human sciences. Drawing on the works of a vast range of authors from Rousseau and Hegel to Abdelkader and al-Afghani, it examines how orientalism and Biblical criticism shaped the intertwined histories of philosophy and social sciences in Europe. It thus offers a counterreading of Foucault's Archeology of the Human Sciences.
In 2024, he was a receipient of the Salomon Faculty Research Award to pursue historical and philosophical work on the metaphysics of amir 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jazaïri (sometimes spelled "Abdelkader"). This research will lead to another set of publication in Afro-Arab studies. Drawing on seminars he gave at Columbia and Brown University and publications, the aim of this research is to deploy a philosophical interpretation of the Algerian revolution and challenges the boundaries between "North" Africa and the rest of the continent. It reactivates the disseminated legacies of forgotten Afro-Arab theorists and artists to think about liberation today. Two articles related to this second project will be published in Expressions maghrébines and Yale French Studies. It will involve pursuing a fieldwork research among griots ("ancestral" storytellers and musicians in West Africa) he started in Burkina Faso in 2014.
He is also pursuing several projects around contemporary art. He is invited to write texts about several contemporary artists for exhibitions catalogs, art galleries or journals such as Flash Art. Artists who invited him to write about their work include: Kader Attia, Bouchra Khalili, Stephanie Saadé, Monia Ben Hamouda, Abdelkader Benchama, Aysha E Arar, among others. He serves as a jury member at Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborates with art curators.
As a musician and performer, he has written about the question of deafness and the politics of voice, both from an anthropological and aesthetic perspective. This work will lead to the creation of an artistic project at the intersection of philosophy and performing arts. He recently peformed a version of it drawing on Algerian eco-poetry at ArtHaus in Buenos Aires, a collaborative show with artist Mathias Duvile and international curator Anissa Touati. The show was covered in La Nacion, Argentina's main newspaper. He recently received a grant from the Brown Arts Institute to work on it with the support of L'Alliance in New York (FIAF) and the FRAC in France.
