Director of African Studies

Dominique Somda received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative at the University of Paris Nanterre. She joins Kalamazoo College from the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she served as a research fellow.

She has held visiting professorships in the Department of Anthropology at Reed College and in both the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris.

Her international experience includes serving as traveling faculty with the International Honors Program (IHP), where she taught anthropology in urban studies and human rights programs across multiple continents, and countries including the U.S., Spain, Jordan, India, Nepal, Senegal, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

In addition to her doctoral degree, Somda holds two master’s degrees: one in ethnology and comparative sociology from the University of Paris Nanterre, and another in philosophy from the University Clermont Auvergne.

Her work focuses on how inequality—or conversely, egalitarianism—emerges through everyday practices, a thematic interest that has also led her to engage with the anthropology of slavery, democracy, Christianity, and feminist and postcolonial studies. More recently, her research has explored the religious ethics of medical technologies. Her regional focus is Madagascar.

Email: dominique.somda@kzoo.edu
Phone: 269.337.7031
Office: Dewing Hall, African Studies Suite, 212D

Courses

Fall 2024

• AFST295 : On Being Human in Africa

Winter 2025

• AFST280: Geography of Africanness (Concentration core course)

Spring 2025

• AFST : Africa Now (Concentration core course)
• AFST : Afro-Feminisms

Office hours

• Tuesday 11:30-1:30 p.m.
• Wednesday 9-11 a.m.