Maya Angela Eipe Smith (she/her/hers)

Maya Smith completed her undergraduate and master’s degree at New York University in the joint MA/BA program with the Institute of French Studies. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Romance Languages and Linguistics. Her scholarship broadly focuses on the intersection of racial and linguistic identity formations among marginalized groups in the African diaspora, particularly in the postcolonial francophone world. Her book, Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries, was published with the University of Wisconsin Press in 2019 and won the Modern Language Association’s French and Francophone Studies book prize. Through a critical examination of language and multilingual practices in qualitative, ethnographic data, Senegal Abroad shows how language is key in understanding the formation of national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities among Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York. In addition to the Senegalese Diaspora, Maya is interested in how Blackness is constructed in the French Caribbean and in inclusive language pedagogies.

She recently co-authored the memoir Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges (2024) with Rising Action Press. Through her personal journey, Alvenia has crossed paths with a wide variety of people in the entertainment industry, from long-term working relationships with the Rolling Stones and Roberta Flack to momentary yet extraordinary encounters with Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Tina Turner. Her story interrogates questions of race and gender in traditionally white male spaces and demonstrates how a memoir about experiences in one’s youthful past can shed insight on how we understand the present as well as help rectify the systemic silencing of black women’s voices in musical history.

Her third book, Ne me quitte pas (2025), was published with Duke University Press. A meditation on translation in the most expansive meaning of the word, this book explores how “Ne me quitte pas”—a text, a piece of cultural production written in a specific context, and a work of mass/popular art—travels across languages, geographies, genres, and generations. The book highlights the song’s winding journey from its origin by Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel to Simone’s riveting cover, to Shirley Bassey’s English rendition “If You Go Away,” and to other adaptations, such as Sasha Velour’s drag performance. Maya analyzes these different versions from various dimensions—language, sound, emotion, culture, gender, and race—to underscore the transformative power of songs.