Dr. Doyle Calhoun is a University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. He teaches and works on a range of topics related to African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas; Senegalese literature and cinema in French and Wolof; the archives and afterlives of French slavery; Négritude; and the literature of decolonization.

Dr. Calhoun's first book The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke UP, 2024) charts a long history of self-killings as a political language in extremis, from the time of slavery to the present day. Along with Cheikh Thiam, he co-edited Senegalese Transmediations: Literautre, New Media and Audio/Visual Cultures (Yale UP, 2024). He is also a co-editor and translator of the forthcoming volume On Freedom: A Senghor Reader (Duke UP), a translated collection of the philosophical writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor from the series Liberté (Seuil). 

Calhoun is the author of over two dozen articles, essays, and book chapters on topics ranging from the cinema of Ousmane Sembène and the poetry of Aimé Césaire, to Charles Baudelaire's and Émile Zola's colonial entanglements, to the history of missionary and colonial linguistics in West Africa. His articles have won prizes such as the William R. Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association (2023), the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History (2021), and the Vivien Law Prize from the Henry Sweet Society (2016). He has also held residencies at the Fondation Camargo (Cassis) and the Bibliothèque Marmottan (Boulogne-Billancourt) in France.

Dr. Calhoun is currently working on two new books, 1848: African Aesthetics after Abolition, 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.