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• 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:

•  (Duke University Press, 2024)**Winner of the thirty-third annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies of the Modern Language Association
• with Alioune Fall & Cheikh Thiam,  (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2026)
• Mourir pour n'être à personne, préface d'Elsa Dorlin, trans. Cécile Hermellin (La Découverte, forthcoming 2026)   

Edited volumes:

• , co-edited with Cheikh Thiam (Yale University Press, 2025)

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 (������Ƶ 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:

• "Spectacles of Return: The Silent Labors of Dahomey," Public Books (2025), 
• "A Map to Black Paris?" Los Angeles Review of Books (2025),
• "African Transmedia: Says Who?," Yale University Press Blog (2025), 
• “An ‘Extreme Act of Protest’: The Long History of Self-Immolation as Political Statement,” Salon (2024), 
• “Putting French Literary History on Trial,” The Sydney Review of Books (2022),  [selected for reprint from Public Books]
• “Putting French Literary History on Trial,” Public Books (2022), 
• “Sembène’s Black Girl Is a Ghost Story,” Public Books (2021), 
• “How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters Out of Men,” Public Books (2021), 

Podcasts

• "The Suicide Archive," Conversations in Atlantic Theory (2025), 
• “The Archipelago, feat. Doyle Calhoun,” Stegi Radio (2025), 
• “The Suicide Archive,” New Books Network (2024), 
• “Raconter les suicides d’esclaves: des histoires qui sortent du silence,” Canal Académies (2022), https:// .