François-Xavier Fauvelle was born in 1968. After earning master’s degrees in philosophy and then in history, he defended his doctoral dissertation in African history in 1999 at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, under the supervision of Jean Boulègue. He taught history at Paris-I before being recruited by the CNRS in 2002 and assigned to the Institute of African Studies in Aix-en-Provence. Throughout his career, he has spent several extended periods abroad: in the United States in 1996–1997 (as a Scholar Affiliate at the University of Iowa), in Ethiopia in 2000–2001 (as a postdoctoral researcher at the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa), in South Africa in 2005–2006 (as a CNRS researcher at the French Institute of South Africa in Johannesburg), again in Ethiopia in 2006–2009 (as director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies), in the United States as a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2020, in Israel in 2023–2026 (as director of the French Research Center in Jerusalem). From 2013 to 2017, he directed the TRACES Laboratory at the University of Toulouse-II-Jean-Jaurès, where, as chair of the organizing committee, he hosted the 23rd World Congress of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists in 2016. François-Xavier Fauvelle was elected professor at the Collège de France in 2019. In 2027, he will deliver the Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton University in the United States.
