A. Véronique Charles is a researcher, writer, and interdisciplinary scholar in literary studies at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. 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 reconfigure 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 early twentieth-century European schools of anthropology.

Charles is at work 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. Early 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.

For the academic year 2023-2024, A. Véronique Charles is one of the three principal investigators, along with Thomas W. Dodman and Farah Jasmine Griffin, for the Provost-Funded Project “Afro-Francospheres.” As a faculty working group, Afro-Francospheres is a burgeoning research and teaching initiative at Columbia dedicated to realizing the intercontinental shifts within the field of African Diaspora Studies through curricular and public programming at Morningside (New York) and Reid Hall (Paris) campuses. Additionally, Charles’s teaching comprises of survey courses and specialized seminars in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, Columbia Global Center | Paris, and Center for the Core Curriculum.