Doyle Calhoun is a literary historian and critic whose research and teaching focus on the French-language literatures of Africa and the Caribbean, especially Senegalese literature in French and Wolof. His first book, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. The Suicide Archive charts a long history of suicidal resistance as a political language in extremis, from the time of slavery to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. It offers a powerful reflection on aesthetic production in the face of death and dispossession as well as a new way of looking at the interrelation of suicide, literature, coloniality, and their archives. Along with Cheikh Thiam (Amherst College), he is the co-editor of a forthcoming special double issue of Yale French Studies on Senegalese literature and audiovisual cultures (fall 2024), as well as the first English-language edition of Senghor’s writings from the series Liberté.

Calhoun has published on a wide range of topics—from the poetry of Aimé Césaire and the cinema of Ousmane Sembène to the history of colonial and missionary linguistics, to Baudelaire and Zola’s colonial entanglements. His work has appeared in journals such as PMLA, New Literary History, Research in African Literatures, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, French Studies, The Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, Language & History, Paragraph, and the Canadian Journal of African Studies. His public-facing scholarship has appeared in Public Books and The Sydney Review of Books. In 2021, he received the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History for the best essay by an untenured scholar for his article “Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists: On Suicide Bombing and Literature.” Calhoun’s research has been supported by residencies from the Camargo Foundation and the Institut de France and by fellowships from Fulbright, the American Institute of Maghrib Studies, Phi Beta Kappa, and Chateaubriand.

Calhoun received his PhD in French from Yale in 2022 (with distinction), after having earned a masters in linguistics (summa cum laude) from KU Leuven in Belgium and receiving his BA in linguistics and French (summa cum laude) from Boston College in 2016.

curriculum vitae

• (2023) “Flipping the Script? Native Speaker Linguistis in and Colonial Orthographies in Nineteenth-Century Senegal,” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics [ahead of print]
• (2023) “Variations on Verrition: (Re)turning to the Enigmatic Final Word of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal,” PMLA vol. 138, no. 2, 306–20.
• (2022) “Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists: On Suicide Bombing and Literature,” New Literary History vol. 53, no. 2, 285–304.
• (2022) “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: Studies in Linguistic Historiography in Honour of Pierre Swiggers, Orbis Supplementa 47, edited by Tim Denecker, Piet Desmet, Lieve Jooken, Peter Lauwers, Toon Van Hal & Raf Van Rooy (Peeters-Orbis Supplementa), 425-41.
• (2021) “Looking for Diouana Gomis (1927–1958): The Story behind African Cinema’s most Iconic Suicide,” Research in African Literatures vol. 52, no. 2, 1-35.
• (2021) “A Fugue for the Middle Passage? Suicidal Resistance takes Flight in Fabienne Kanor’s Humus (2006),” French Review, vol. 95, no. 2, 111-28.
• (2021) “Unearthing the Subtext of Slavery in Zola’s Germinal,” French Studies vol. 75, no. 4, 1-20.
• (2020) “(Im)possible Inscriptions: Silence, Servitude, and Suicide in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de…,” Research in African Literatures vol. 51, no. 2 (Summer 2020), 96-116.
• (2020) “Flowers for Baudelaire: Urban Botany and Allegorical Writing,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies vol. 49, nos. 1-2, 17-34.
• (2020) “Fanon’s Lexical Intervention: Writing Blackness in Black Skin, White Masks,” Paragraph vol. 43, no. 2, 159-78.
• (2018) “Colonial Collectors: Missionaries’ Botanical and Linguistic Prospecting in French Colonial Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / La revue canadienne des études africaines vol. 52, no. 2, 205-28.
• (2017) “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 vol. 27, no. 1, 137-66.
• (2017) “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 vol. 60, no. 1, 53-72.