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 as an Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies, affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies at the Watson Institute. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization. The book won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023 and was published in English in April 2024 by Verso Books.
His second book was published in French in 2023. It is titled: Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (At the Edge of the Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology. His work reaches both an Academic and non-Academic audiences in Europe and Africa, with talks at Harvard University, The Collège de France, MoMa PS1, LuMA, The Night of Ideas in New York or Dakar as well as in Morocco. His books have been reviewed in several media such as Le Monde, Mediapart and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also invited to write texts about several contemporary artists for exhibitions catalogs, art galleries or journals such as Flash Art.
At Brown, Mohamed Amer Meziane primarily teaches world philosophies by exploring both the Western and non-Western canons of critical theory. His seminars focus on Frantz Fanon, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and anticolonial thought, Hegelianism and Marxism, French and German Contemporary Philosophy, African and Arab Contemporary Theory, History and Literature. In French, he teaches a regular seminar on the birth of decolonization as a horizon of though and practice in the Literature and Theory of authors
He is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first one is titled The Sacrifice of Heaven. It deploys a historical anthropology of 19th century continental philosophy. A critique of Foucault's Archeology of the Human Sciences to challenge its lasting influence on postcolonial theory since Said's Orientalism. Drawing on the works of a vast range of authors from Rousseau and Hegel to Abdelkader and al-Afghani, it tries to show how orientalism and Biblical criticism shaped the intertwined histories of philosophy and social sciences in Europe. The latter deploys 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 African/Arab theorists and artists to think about liberation today.
