Maboula Soumahoro

Image of Maboula Soumahoro
Visiting Faculty

Maboula Soumahoro is a French scholar and writer whose work focuses on US and African-American studies, the African diaspora (Black Atlantic).


Biography

Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. She first taught at Bennington College for the MATSL program in 2003, and has since taught at Barnard College, the Bard Prison Initiative, and Columbia University where she was also invited as a Visiting Scholar (2002-2003) and International Visiting Professor (Mellon Arts Project, Fall 2022).

A well published specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research, and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta. She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021). This book received the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020.

Based in France, Soumahoro served as an appointed member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery from 2013 to 2016. She was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for the 2016-2017 and 2022-2023 academic years.