Director of African Studies
Dr. Dominique Somda
Assistant Professor of Anthropology.
- Email: dominique.somda@kzoo.edu
- Phone: 269.337.7031
- Office: Dewing Hall, African Studies Suite, 212D
Office hours
Monday 2-3 pm Wednesday 10-11 am
Bio
Dominique Somda received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative at the University of Paris Nanterre. She joined 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.
She is an editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies and serves on the board of the Canadian Association of African Studies.
Courses in the Concentration
Fall 2025
- AFST/ANSO205 : Global Africa (Concentration core course)
Winter 2026
- AFST/ANSO: Thinking Africa (Concentration core course)
- AFST/ANSO 211 : Global Black Feminism (Also contributing to WGS)
Spring 2026
- AFST/ANSO280: Geography of Africanness (Concentration core course)
- AFST/ANSO : From Wakanda to Silicon Savannah: Imagining Black Futures
Core Faculty
eading
Pr. Espelencia Baptiste
Associate Professor of Anthropology
- Email: Espelencia.Baptiste@kzoo.edu
- Office: Olds Upton 110B
- Phone: 269.337.7052
Bio
Coming Soon!
Courses in the concentration
ANSO 410: Missionaries to Pilgrims: Diasporic Returns
AFST 426 Lest We Forget: Memory and Identity in the African Diaspora
Dr. Manfa Sanogo
Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies.
- Email: Manfa.Sanogo@kzoo.edu
- Office: Dewing 203-H
- Phone: 269.337.7052
Bio
Manfa Sanogo holds a PhD from Florida State University. In his work, he specializes in Malagasy literature with a particular focus on its interactions with the francophone literary canon. His current project consists in highlighting the importance of indigenous literature of Madagascar in the creation of aesthetic innovation in French-language literature and aims at fostering greater scholarly interest on the Indian Ocean as a dynamic and powerful literary center. He was awarded a Chateaubriand Fellowship by the French Embassy in the US for this project in 2018. His next project looks at soccer rituals and the expression of national identity through the lenses of social media groups and posts in West Africa.
Manfa recently completed a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College of Dublin. He has taught at various higher education institutions. He taught French first as the visiting international student at Kalamazoo College, then as a TA and lecturer at UW-Milwaukee and FSU. He also taught at the English departments of Sorbonne Universités and ENS in Paris.
Courses in the concentration
FREN 445 Afro-Perspectives
AFST 455 Letters From the Francophonie
Pr. Babli Sinha
Professor of English.
- Email: babli.sinha@kzoo.edu
- Office: Humphrey House, room 203
- Phone: 269.337.7075
Bio
Babli Sinha is a Professor of English at Kalamazoo College. She received a PhD in English literature from The University of Chicago, a MA in French literature from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a BA in French and English literatures from Washington and Lee University. She is the author of The Bengal Famine and Cultural Production: Signifying Colonial Trauma (Routledge 2024); Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India: Entertaining the Raj (Routledge, 2013) and editor of South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2012). Articles include “Empire films and the dissemination of Americanism in colonial India,” (South Asian History and Culture, 2011), “Dissensus, Education, and Lala Lajpat Rai’s Encounter with W.E.B. DuBois,” (South Asian History and Culture, 2015), “’Lowering our Prestige’: American cinema, mass consumerism, and racial anxiety in colonial India.” (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2009), “Trauma, Realism, and the Bengal Famine of 1943,” (Cultural Dynamics, 2020), “Collective Suffering and the possibility of empathy in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss(Commonwealth Literature, 2018), “The BBC Eastern Service and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 2018), “Managing Orientalism: Biography, Performance, and the Films of Sabu and Merle Oberon.” (South Asian Diaspora, 2016), and “A “strangely un-English actress”: Race, legibility, and the films of Merle Oberon.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2016).
Courses in the concentration
ENGL 260 African Cinemas of Belonging
Contributing Faculty
Dr. Tris Faulkner
Assistant Professor of Spanish
- Email: tris.faulkner@kzoo.edu
- Office: Dewing Hall, 203B
- Phone: 269.337.7324
Bio
Dr. Tris Faulkner holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics from Georgetown University, two master’s degrees (Georgetown and Wake Forest University) in Spanish Linguistics and Interpreting and Translation Studies, as well as a bachelor’s degree (Louisiana State University) in Spanish Language and Literature and International Studies.
She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Linguistics, housed in the Department of Spanish Language and Literatures at Kalamazoo College, while also being a contributing/collective faculty member in the African Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality programs.
Most of Professor Faulkner’s research investigates the semantics and pragmatics of “non-standard” grammars (e.g., the contextual meanings that language forms, whether standard or non-standard, tend to carry). In having this focus, she hopes not only to inform about the beauty, meaningfulness, and normalcy of linguistic variation, but also to help eliminate harmful and discriminatory ideas about “wrong”, “incorrect”, or “bad” language.
Additionally, since the label “non-standard” is often a by-product of social inequities (as opposed to some inherent quality of the language itself), Dr. Faulkner’s teaching and research often discuss the important role that identity plays in the manifestation of linguistic prejudice and/or justice.
Courses in the Concentration
Span 420-01
Dr. Koffi Nomedji
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
- Email: Koffi.nomedji@kzoo.edu
- Office: Dewing Hall, 309F
- Phone: 269-337-7124
Bio
Coming Soon!
Courses in the Concentration
AFST 436 African Indigenous Knowledges and Climate adaptation
AFST 290 Africa in the Global Context