A. Véronique Charles is a researcher, writer, and interdisciplinary scholar in literary studies. Charles holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory with a certificate in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. In broad terms, Charles’s work demonstrates how lesser-studied works of fiction and non-fiction can reassess literary history and criticism, intellectual history, and discourses about past events. Her research methods incorporate the study of novelistic and autobiographic narratives, nineteenth-century archives of the French colonial and metropolitan administration, and insights from early twentieth-century European school of anthropology.

Charles is working on a book manuscript that examines Atlantic slavery and its abolition from a continental African perspective. The book thus reverts scholarly attention to locales, subjective positionalities, and imperial records too often rendered obsolete in linear accounts of slavery in light of the departure of slave ships from Africa. Previous versions of this project received support from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Council of Learned Societies.