Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta. She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021). This book received a special distinction from the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020. This academic year, Maboula Soumahoro is the Mellon International Visiting Professor at the African-American and Africana Studies Department of Columbia University as well as Visiting Faculty at Bennington College. She will be a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination (Columbia University Global Centers, Paris) in 2023-24.

Brigitte Stepanov is an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. She writes and teaches about how categories of being, knowledge, and aesthetic forms are stretched and blurred by violence. In her current book project, Cruelty, War, Fiction: Redefining the In-Human, she dissects the very category of violence in Algeria, Rwanda, and France as defined by legal and literary frames. Trained as a mathematician, a photographer, and a scholar of French and Francophone Studies, she finds herself at the intersection of several disciplines, each lending a lens through which to view our present and its shifting paradigms.

Co-sponsored by the Atlanta Global Studies Center.