Dr Doyle D. Calhoun

Peterhouse
  • University Assistant Professor
Dr Doyle D. Calhoun

Contact

Location

  • Peterhouse, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1RD

About

Dr. Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies and Fellow of Peterhouse. He teaches and works on a broad range of topics related to African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, especially Senegalese literature and film in French and Wolof. He is the author of The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke UP, 2024), recipient of the thirty-third annual MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, which charts 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.” A French translation, Mourir pour n'être à personne is forthcoming from La Découverte (2026). Along with Cheikh Thiam, he edited the volume Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media and Audio/Visual Cultures (Yale UP, 2025), which explores the convergence of literature and various audiovisual artforms within Senegal’s vibrant and dynamic media ecologies. Calhoun also completed a book-length translation of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s prose works, The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (trans. and ed. Doyle D Calhoun, Alioune Fall & Cheikh Thiam), which will be published by Duke University Press in April 2026. Dr. Calhoun has also published articles on the history of missionary and colonial linguistics as well as historical sociolinguistics. His public-facing criticism has appeared in venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon and Public Books. 

He is the organiser of the film series and symposium 'La Noire de...' at Sixty: Reflecting on the Life and Legacy of an African Classic (12–14 November 2025, University of Cambridge). 

He is currently working on two new books, Africa after 1848, about how contemporary writers from Africa and the African diaspora remake conservative and teleological understandings of abolition, and Florence, an exploration of France’s mission civilisatrice through the biography of one of West Africa’s first women religious.

Dr. Calhoun’s articles have received several prizes, including the 2024 Malcolm Bowie Prize from the Society for French Studies, the 2024 William R. Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association, the 2021 Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History, and the 2016 Vivien Law Prize from the Henry Sweet Society.

Dr. Calhoun received his Ph.D. in French from Yale University in 2022, where he was also an affiliate of the Council on African Studies, after earning an M.A. in linguistics from KU Leuven. Before coming to Cambridge, he taught for two years at Trinity College (CT). He has held academic residencies at the Fondation Camargo (Cassis) and the Bibliothèque Marmottan (Boulogne-Billancourt) in France and studied, researched, and taught in the United States, France, Belgium, Senegal, Morocco, and the Caribbean. As an undergraduate, he studied linguistics and French literature at Boston College (USA).

Research

  • Francophone African and Caribbean literature and cinema 
  • Senegalese literature and cinema in French and Wolof
  • The archives and afterlives of Atlantic/American and African slavery
  • Abolition
  • Négritude and African philosophy
  • African transmedia
  • The literature of decolonization
  • The history of linguistic thought, especially missionary and colonial linguistics

Published works: 

Books:

 

Edited volumes:

 

Articles and book chapters:

  • “Negritude and the Promise of African Literature,” in Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960–2015, eds. Cajetan Iheka and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 65–86
  • “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. doi:10.1017/pli.2024.20
  • “'A Kind of Literary Archeology': Excavating Morocco’s Slave Past,” African Studies Review 68, no. 1 (2025): 1–20. doi:10.1017/asr.2024.239.
  • with Jill M. Jarvis, “Follow the Ghosts: On Teaching Mati Diop’s Atlantique(s) Transmedially,” Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025), 69–99.
  • “Flipping the Script? Native-Speaker Linguists and Colonial Orthographies in Nineteenth-Century Senegal,” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 9, no. 2 (2023), 1–29.
  • “Variations on Verrition: Re/turning to the Enigmatic Final Word of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” PMLA 138, no. 2 (2023), 306–320. **Winner of the 2023 Malcolm Bowie Prize, Society for French Studies; winner of the 2023 William Riley Parker Prize, PMLA
  • “Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists: On Suicide Bombing and Literature,” New Literary History 53, no. 2 (2022), 285–304.**Winner of the 2021 Ralph Cohen Prize, New Literary History
  • “Au seuil de la grammaire: l’appareil préfaciel français dans la grammaticographie « missionnaire » de langues africaines à l’époque coloniale, 1850–1930,” in The Architecture of Grammar, Tim Denecker, Piet Desmet, Lieve Jooken, Peter Lauwers, Toon Van Hal & Raf Van Rooy (Leuven: Peeters–Orbis Supplementa, 2022), 425–41.
  • “Looking for Diouana Gomis (1927–1958): The Story behind African Cinema’s most Iconic Suicide,” Research in African Literatures 52, no. 2 (2021), 1–35.
  • “A Fugue for the Middle Passage? Suicidal Resistance takes Flight in Fabienne Kanor’s Humus (2006),” French Review 95, no. 2 (2021), 127–44. doi: 10.1353/tfr.2021.0267.
  • “Unearthing the Subtext of Slavery in Zola’s Germinal,” French Studies 75, no. 4 (2021), 449–67.
  • “(Im)possible Inscriptions: Silence, Servitude, and Suicide in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de…,” Research in African Literatures 51, no. 2 (2020), 96–116.
  • “Flowers for Baudelaire: Urban Botany and Allegorical Writing,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 49, nos. 1–2 (2020), 17–34. doi: 10.1353/ncf.2020.011.
  • “Fanon’s Lexical Intervention: Writing Blackness in Black Skin, White Masks,” Paragraph 43, no. 2 (2020), 159–78.
  • “Colonial Collectors: Missionaries’ Botanical and Linguistic Prospecting in French Colonial Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / La revue canadienne des études africaines 52, no. 2 (2018), 205–28.
  • “What Gets Lost in the Digital (Re-)presentation of Older Linguistic Texts? Digital Editions, Manuscript Reality, and Lessons from the Digital Humanities for the History of Linguistics,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 27, no. 1 (2017), 137–66.
  • “Reading Paratexts in Missionary Linguistic Works: An Analysis of the Preface to the Holy Ghost Fathers’ (1855) Dictionnaire français–wolof et wolof–français,” Language & History 60, no. 1 (2017), 53–72.**Winner of the 2016 Vivien Law Prize, Language & History

Essays, interviews & translations:

  • “Editor’s Preface: Senegalese Transmediations,” Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025), 1–13
  • with Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, “Thinking in Images: A Conversation with Mohamed Mbougar Sarr,” Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025), 219–41
  • (from French) Elgas, “Elgas’s Notebooks: Return to Koubanao,” Yale French Studies 144/145 (2025), 2019–15

Public criticism:

Podcasts

Teaching and supervision

Dr. Calhoun welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students interested in working on topics in African and/or Caribbean literatures and cinemas, the afterlives of French slavery, Négritude and Panafricanism, and the literature of decolonization.