Fatima El-Tayeb

Fatima El-Tayeb is Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to arriving at Yale, she was a member of the departments of Literature and Ethnic Studies and director of Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She received her MA in American Studies and Modern European History and her PhD in History from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include Black Europe, comparative diaspora studies, queer of color critique, critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, transnational feminisms, visual culture studies, race and technology, and critical European studies.

 

She is the author of three books, Schwarze Deutsche. ‘Rasse’ und nationale Identität 1890 – 1933 (Campus Verlag, 2001), European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Un/German. Racialized Otherness in Post-Cold War Europe (Cornell University Press 2025), and has co-edited a special issue on Time, Urgency, and Collaboration in the Corporate University for Feminist Formations. Her numerous articles and book chapters on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation seek to deconstruct structural racism in “colorblind” Europe and center strategies of resistance among racialized communities, especially those that politicize culture through an intersectional, queer practice. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and Danish. Her ongoing research projects explore the intersecting legacies of colonialism, fascism, and socialism in Europe and the potential of on transformative archives both in theory and practice.

 

El-Tayeb is founder of the Digital Archive of Black Europe and co-director of the Intersectional Black European Studies project. At Yale, she organizes the Race, Migration, and Coloniality in Europe Working Group. In addition to her academic work, she co-wrote (with Angelina Maccarone) the Black lesbian screwball comedy Alles wird gut/Everything Will be Fine (1997).