I’m a Banting Research Fellow in Francophone Literatures from the African diaspora in the Department for the Arts, Languages, and Literatures at the Université de Sherbrooke, following a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Francophone Literatures from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean in the Department of French Studies at the University of Toronto.

I received my PhD in Francophone Literatures from the University of Toronto in June 2022. I have a double specialization in book history and digital humanities, and over twelve years of experience in the publishing sector in the French-speaking world, including France, Cameroon, and the African diaspora in Canada.

My current research project explores the collective memory surrounding books in the novels of eight contemporary Francophone African writers of the diaspora (1999-2021). Through literary and computational analysis, it examines how the portrayal of books in African fiction shapes a distinct transnational literary field with its own cultural and institutional actors, norms, and values. This research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is groundbreaking as it is the first comparative study of book representation in African diasporic literature. It sheds light on the involvement of African authors in redefining their literary heritage, reconfiguring the concept of ‘literary field’, deepening insights into book dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora, advancing contemporary African epistemology through the decolonization of colonial knowledge systems and the production of endogenous ones, and finally introducing a pioneering methodology which, as I have shown, can serve as a reference for other areas such as Caribbean literature and its diaspora.

My second project centers on Afrofuturist African and Caribbean literatures, an emerging field that remains overlooked. This project builds upon my previous research, where I used digital tools to analyze literature. Here, the focus shifts to studying the portrayal of technology in fiction as the primary subject of investigation. Just like books, technologies disseminate information, shape society, and blur the lines between fiction and reality, enabling African and Caribbean writers to engage with topics related to technological advancements, historical injustices, socioeconomic disparities, and environmental issues, leading to literary breakthroughs, and offering an opportunity for literary critics to be at the forefront of our current technological and anthropological revolution.

I’m currently a member of the Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec [Research and Study Group on the Book in Quebec].