Bio

I am a scholar of Francophone cultural studies and colonial history, with a focus on early to mid-20^th century French West Africa, environmental studies, education, and autobiography. I am interested in the ways that both French and West African individuals used narrative to claim power within the colonial system, and I do this by looking at a wide variety of archival sources from France and Senegal.

Prior to working at State, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, where I also completed my graduate studies. Before that, though, I lived in a lot of places. I’m from a fairly small town in East Tennessee. I went to school in-state before joining the Peace Corps, where I served as a community health volunteer in Burkina Faso for two years. After the Peace Corps, I worked briefly as a park ranger at a national park in Northern Virginia, before becoming an English Teaching Assistant in Limoges, France, through TAPIF. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, graduate student, and now faculty, I found and find myself constantly motivated by simple questions with complicated answers: how do people make sense of the colonial past? How are things like agriculture used to assert power within the colonial system? And how do stories, those told in the past as well as those we tell now, shape the nature of history itself?

At UVA, I taught introductory and intermediate French, Reading French for Graduate Students, French for Global Development, and a course titled “The Art of the Autobiography,” in which first year university students both analyzed and created autobiographies of their own. At State, I teach advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses on Francophone cultural studies and colonial studies. I am passionate about teaching students the complexities of the Francophone world, as well as how to create good and meaningful questions to guide their own academic pursuits.

Publications

• Alinesitoué Diatta: Rebel Leader or Colonial Scapegoat? , French Historical Studies (2024)
• Amadou Cissé on the ‘dangers’ of millet: A microhistory of colonial power, colonized agency, and agricultural knowledge in the schools of colonial Senegal, 1911–14 , Francosphères (2024)
• Meghan O'Donoghue. Review of Deets, Mark W.. A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal , H-Africa, H-Net Reviews (2024)