Doyle D. Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, where his teaching and research focus on West African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas in French and Wolof. He is the author of The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke University Press, 2024) and, with Cheikh Thiam, the editor of Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures (Yale University Press, 2025). He also translated and edited, with Alioune B. Fall and Cheikh Thiam, The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2026). His public-facing writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Sydney Review of Books, and Salon. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2022.
Doyle D. Calhoun
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Writing on Public Books
Spectacles of Return: The Silent Labors of “Dahomey”
“Dahomey” narrates the Danxomèan treasures’ epic journey home. And yet, the film remains haunted by the visible and invisible human labor that made this homecoming—and its cinematic telling—possible.
Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
Sembène’s “Black Girl” Is a Ghost Story
Few know the film—the first feature-length film by a West African director—was based on a real-life incident, a real tragedy lost in colonial archives.
How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters out of Men
In both World Wars, France used West African “colonial conscripts.” Deployed on the front lines, they were often the first to be killed.[none-for-homepage]
