Africa after 1848Remaking Abolition in the French-Speaking World
How contemporary writers from Africa and the African diaspora remake conservative and teleological understandings of abolition.
Doyle D.Calhoun
ScholarCriticTranslator
I write about African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, the archives and afterlives of French and African slaveries, and Senegalese cultural production in Wolof and French, from the nineteenth century to the present. My scholarship traverses languages and media as well as historical periods. My public-facing writing appears in venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books and The New York Times.
I am University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse.
Current fellowshipsBooks, translations & edited volumes
Now writing
Two books in progress
Supported by fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Leverhulme Trust.
FlorencePortrait of an Enslaved Childhood Between Abolitions
France’s missionary projects in early nineteenth-century French West Africa, excavated through the story of one of West Africa’s first women religious.
Under contract · Yale University Press, Black Lives series
Books
Books, translations & edited volumes
Mourir pour n’être à personneSuicide et résistance dans l’archive coloniale française
Retrace l’histoire longtemps occultée du suicide dans l’espace colonial français grâce à une brillante exploration des archives, des textes littéraires et des œuvres cinématographiques.
Framework 67La Noire de…Cover forthcoming
La Noire de…The Lives and Legacies of an African Classic
Revisits Ousmane Sembène’s landmark film, with contributions from filmmakers such as Moussa Sène Absa and Johanna Makabi, as well as Alain Sembène and major voices in African cinemas, including Samba Gadjigo, June Givanni, Manthia Diawara and Mahen Bonetti.
The Essential SenghorAfrican Philosophy and Black Aesthetics
A book-length English translation of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s prose works.
Senegalese TransmediationsLiterature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures
Explores the convergence of literature and audiovisual art forms within Senegal’s media ecologies, with contributions from scholars, filmmakers such as Moussa Sène Absa, writers such as Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, curators and visual artists.
The Suicide ArchiveReading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire
A long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian war for independence to the “Arab Spring.” Drawing on scientific texts, police records, oral histories, and African and Caribbean literature and film, the book reads aesthetic forms as alternative archives of historical memory.
- Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, Modern Language Association
- Book of the Year, African Literature Association
- Runner-up, R. Gapper Book Prize, Society for French Studies
- Shortlisted, Paul E. Lovejoy Book Prize, Journal of Global Slavery
Public writing
Essays & criticism
The New York Times · Opinion
“When Black Writers Are Guilty Until Proved Human”
Online 11 October 2026 · Print 13 October 2026 Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly“Black Girl Interrupted”
2026 · with Amber Bal · “Scene” issue, print and online Public Books“Spectacles of Return: The Silent Labors of Dahomey”
2025 Los Angeles Review of Books“A Map to Black Paris?”
2025 Salon“An ‘Extreme Act of Protest’: The Long History of Self-Immolation as Political Statement”
2024 Public Books“Putting French Literary History on Trial”
2022 Public Books“Sembène’s Black Girl Is a Ghost Story”
2021 Public Books“How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters Out of Men”
2021
Scholarship
Articles & chapters
Peer-reviewed work on literature and film, slavery and abolition, and the history of missionary and colonial linguistics.
- 2026L’Esprit Créateur 66, no. 2 (2026): 69–85
- 2025In African Literature in Transition: Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960–2015, ed. Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Cajetan Iheka (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 65–86
- 2025“Senegalese New(s) Media: Transpositions and Transformations of the Fait Divers in Aminata Maïga Ka”Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 11, no. 3 (2025): 277–97
- 2025African Studies Review 68, no. 1 (2025): 1–202026 ASR Best Article Prize, African Studies Association
- 2025Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025): 69–99
- 2024Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 10, no. 1 (2024): 1–30
- 2023PMLA 138, no. 2 (2023): 306–20Malcolm Bowie Prize, Society for French Studies · William Riley Parker Prize, MLA (2023)
- 2022New Literary History 53, no. 2 (2022): 285–304Ralph Cohen Prize, New Literary History (2021)
- 2022In The Architecture of Grammar: Studies in Linguistic Historiography in Honor of Pierre Swiggers, ed. Tim Denecker, Piet Desmet, Lieve Jooken, Peter Lauwers, Toon Van Hal and Raf Van Rooy, Orbis Supplementa 47 (Leuven: Peeters, 2022), 423–40
- 2021Research in African Literatures 52, no. 2 (2021): 1–35
- 2021French Review 95, no. 2 (2021): 127–44
- 2021French Studies 75, no. 4 (2021): 449–67
- 2020Research in African Literatures 51, no. 2 (2020): 96–116
- 2020Nineteenth-Century French Studies 49, nos. 1–2 (2020): 17–34
- 2020Paragraph 43, no. 2 (2020): 159–78
- 2018Canadian Journal of African Studies / La revue canadienne des études africaines 52, no. 2 (2018): 205–28
- 2017Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 27, no. 1 (2017): 137–66
- 2017Language & History 60, no. 1 (2017): 53–72Vivien Law Prize, Henry Sweet Society (2016)
Shorter scholarship
Selected essays, interviews & translations
- 2026“Black Girl Redux” (editor’s introduction)La Noire de…: The Lives and Legacies of an African Classic, special double issue of Framework 67, nos. 1–2 (2026)
- 2026“‘A Second Life’: La Noire de…/Black Girl (1966) and Notre mémoire/Our Memory (2021) in Dialogue” (interview, with Alain Sembène and Johanna Makabi)La Noire de…: The Lives and Legacies of an African Classic, special double issue of Framework 67, nos. 1–2 (2026)
- 2026“A Curious Absence? Ousmane Sembène in London” (roundtable, with June Givanni, Damilola Lemomu and James S. Williams)La Noire de…: The Lives and Legacies of an African Classic, special double issue of Framework 67, nos. 1–2 (2026)
- 2025“Editor’s Preface: Senegalese Transmediations”Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025): 1–13
- 2025“Thinking in Images: A Conversation with Mohamed Mbougar Sarr” (interview, with Mohamed Mbougar Sarr)Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025): 219–41
- 2025Elgas, “Elgas’s Notebooks: Return to Koubanao” (translated from French)Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025): 201–15
Conversations
Podcasts & interviews
Events
Networks, screenings & symposia
African Humanities Research Network
Co-convener of a Cambridge network for research across African literatures, histories, languages and arts.
“La Noire de…” at Sixty
Three days of screenings and an international symposium on the life and legacy of Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film, with filmmakers, critics and Sembène’s family.
About
Biography
Doyle D. Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He works comparatively on African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas from the nineteenth century to the present.
His first book, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke, 2024), received the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies and the African Literature Association’s Book of the Year award. A French translation is forthcoming from La Découverte. With Cheikh Thiam he edited Senegalese Transmediations (Yale, 2025), and with Alioune Fall and Cheikh Thiam he translated and edited The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (Duke, 2026).
His articles have won the African Studies Association’s ASR Best Article Prize, the Malcolm Bowie Prize of the Society for French Studies, the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize, the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History, and the Vivien Law Prize of the Henry Sweet Society. His criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon and Public Books.
He received his Ph.D. in French from Yale University in 2022, where he was an affiliate of the Council on African Studies, after an M.A. in French linguistics from KU Leuven and undergraduate study in linguistics and French literature at Boston College. Before Cambridge he taught for two years at Trinity College, Connecticut. He has held residencies at the Fondation Camargo in Cassis and the Bibliothèque Marmottan in Boulogne-Billancourt, and has studied, researched and taught in the United States, France, Belgium, Senegal, Morocco and the Caribbean.
Appointments
- University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial StudiesUniversity of Cambridge
- Fellow in Modern LanguagesPeterhouse, Cambridge
- Cullman Center FellowNew York Public Library, 2026–27
- Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow2027–28
Service
- Executive Committee and SecretaryHenry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas
- LLC Francophone Executive CommitteeModern Language Association
- Editorial Board, Francophone Postcolonial Studies seriesLiverpool University Press
- Advisory BoardBassi Foundation Press
Education
- Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A. in FrenchYale University, 2022
- M.A. in French LinguisticsKU Leuven, 2018
- B.A., Linguistics and FrenchBoston College, 2016
Speaking, writing & graduate inquiries
I welcome inquiries about speaking and writing engagements, and from prospective MPhil and PhD students working on African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, the afterlives of French slavery, Négritude and Panafricanism, or the literature of decolonization.
Email
dc653@cam.ac.uk
Peterhouse, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RD · In residence at the New York Public Library, 2026–27