Lydie Moudileno is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French, with secondary appointments in the departments of American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on literary and cultural productions from the Francophone world, in particular the Caribbean, and West and Central Africa, as well as postcolonial France. Her books have examined issues of authorship and metaliterary representations in Francophone Caribbean literature, post-Negritude Congolese fiction and contemporary African fiction. They include:

• L’écrivain antillais au miroir de sa littérature (2000)
• Maryse Condé-une nomade inconvenante-ed (2002)
• Parades post coloniales: la fabrication des identités dans le roman congolais (2006)
• Littératures africaines francophones des années 1980 et 1990 (2019)
• Postcolonial Realms of Memory-ed (2020)

She is also the co-editor of several volumes and special issues on literary representations of blackness in Francophone fiction, and on writers Maryse Condé and Marie NDiaye.

Her more recent work has focused examinations of race in contemporary French culture: Mythologies postcoloniales: Décoloniser le quotidien (Champion, 2018), a study of race in popular culture at the turn of the millennium inspired by the work of Roland Barthes, and Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Signs and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool University Press, 2020), a collected and co-edited volume investigating traces of the colonial past in contemporary France.

Before joining USC Lydie Moudileno was Professor of Romance Languages, Comparative Literature and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also directed the African Studies Center (Title VI NRC). She has held visiting professorships at NYU, Johns Hopkins University, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, and the EHESS in Paris.