Maboula Soumahoro

Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures.

She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated into English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021) and prefaced by Saidiya Hartman. This book was distinguished by the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020.

She was the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta, Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, and Visiting Faculty at Bennington College and served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (2013-2017). In 2023-2024, she was a fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

She translated Saidiya Hartman classic work, Lose Your Mother : A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) from English as À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l’esclavage released in September 2023 (Brook).

Photo credit: Patricia Khan