Ayo A. Coly is Professor of Comparative Literature and African Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial discourses about Africa and gender and sexuality in African contexts. She is trained as an interdisciplinary scholar and works with literary texts, visual arts, and performance arts. She is the author of Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women’s Discourses of the Female Body (2019) and The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures (2010). Ayo is currently completing a book manuscript on French Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou: World Literature Otherwise: Alain Mabanckou and the Category of African Literature. She is also conducting research towards 2 additional books: The Arts of Gender Parity & The Idea of Africa: Queer and Gendered Mediations.

She has guest-edited special issues of The African Studies Review on “Homophobic Africa?” and “Women Writing Africa” and Callaloo on “The Cultures and Letters of the Black Diaspora.” Her articles have appeared in Culture, Theory and Critique, Third Text, Research in African Literatures, Nottingham French Studies, and The African Studies Review, among other journals. In 2021 she was appointed as a Research Associate with the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class at the University of Johannesburg.