I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher in Francophone literatures from sub-Saharan Africa at the University of Toronto.

I received my PhD from the University of Toronto in 2022, with a double specialization in Francophone literatures and digital humanities.

Born in France, I have a Master’s degree in Digital Humanities from the Université de Bretagne-Sud (first year) and in French Applied to Writing & Publishing from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 (second year). After five years working in content development and African publishing as well as teaching at the university level, I moved to Canada in 2015 to study Francophone literatures at Simon Fraser University. As of the fall semester of 2016, I’ve been pursuing my PhD at the University of Toronto.

My research work is mainly focused on contemporary Francophone literatures from North-Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean; the sociology of literature; book history and print culture; and digital humanities. My doctoral research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, provides new insight on the impact of the printed book in African and Caribbean contexts through analyzing its representations in contemporary African and Caribbean fiction. Located at the intersection between literary and critical theory (postcolonial and intertextuality studies) and the sociology of literature, the research traces the history of the book in Africa and the West Indies in the twentieth and early twenty-first century, about which still little is known, while positing that the inseparability between literary history and the book indicates the significance of researching how novels represent themselves and their genealogy. Leveraging computational tools, I seek to understand the significance of the word “book” in a relational way with respect to a textual context (the words co-located with “book”), a social and historical context (contemporary Africa, the Caribbean, and their diasporas), and several methods (text mining, word frequency lists, corpus collocates and correlations, word frequency trends, and topic modeling) .

My second research project is dedicated to the “contemporary sub-Saharan African and Caribbean library”. If the colonial library has been amply studied since V. Y. Mudimbe, the same cannot be said of the written materials that sub-Saharan African and Caribbean novelists put on their fictional shelves, such as manuscripts, books, notebooks, booklets, and newspapers, as well as the anthropological, sociological, historical, theological, and literary knowledge they contain. Where do these written documents come from? How are the ideas they contain expressed, received, then passed on? How do these ideas impact individuals and society at large? These are some of the questions I intend to answer using a combined qualitative and quantitative approach. Research such as this is of critical importance during a time when postcolonial writers and researchers seek to decolonize knowledge, since it analyzes its (re)production, dissemination, and legitimization in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and their diasporas.

I currently serve as an editorial board member of Arborescences, revue d’études françaises.