I am a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), where I am working on the project “Religion, Morality and Boko in West Africa“. My research focuses on the history of Islam and Muslim societies in francophone West Africa from the 1960s to the present. I have conducted extensive fieldwork and archival research in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo, examining Islamic activism among youth and women, their appropriation of (new) media, and Muslim politics.
I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled Religious Activism on Campuses in Togo and Benin. This study uncovers the overlooked history of Christian and Islamic organisations at the Université de Lomé and the Université d’Abomey-Calavi since the 1970s, institutions previously dominated by leftist and secular ideologies.
A significant part of my work involves digital humanities (DH), with a focus on the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC). This open-access digital database contains over 8,800 documents and 850 bibliographical references on Islam in six West African countries, comprising over 18 million words. To analyse this vast corpus, I use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to uncover patterns and trends in Francophone West African Muslim societies that traditional research methods might miss. This innovative approach brings fresh perspectives to the field, combining historical expertise with cutting-edge computational analysis.
I am the author of La construction d’une sphère publique musulmane en Afrique de l’Ouest (Presses de l’Université Laval/Hermann, 2016) and co-editor of Religiosity on University Campuses in Africa: Trends and Experiences (Lit Verlag, 2023). I have also co-edited two special journal issues: “Muslim Minorities in Africa, Part 1 & Part 2” (Islamic Africa, 2021-22) and “Les acteurs religieux africains à l’ère du numérique” (Émulations, 2017). My research has been published in eleven peer-reviewed journals and six edited collections.
Prior to my current position, I was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida, and a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa. I received my Ph.D. in History from the Université Laval (Canada) in 2018 with distinction.
Through my ongoing research and DH projects, I continue to explore new approaches to understanding the dynamics of Muslim societies in Francophone West Africa, combining traditional historical methods with innovative computational techniques.