Alexis Trouillot

Alexis Trouillot is an Assistant Professor of African and African-American Studies with a research concentration in the intellectual history of Mathematics in Africa. At the broadest level, his scholarship focuses on the discursive usages of the category of “science,” when and why certain kinds of discursive production are classified as “scientific”, and what assumptions underpin such a designation. In particular, his research addresses how historical and present-day discourse around scientific knowledge production have imagined Africa as a place outside of history.

Professor Trouillot's current book project, Numbers of Sand: Computing Texts in a West African Space, presents an intellectual history of calculations in the Saharan West Africa in the nineteenth century. To explain how numeracy and arithmetic were taught and used in the region before French colonization, this book takes as a case study a corpus of manuscripts in Arabic written in Bilād Shinqīṭ (present-day Mauritania) as well as the wider Muslim World. More specifically, these manuscripts involved arithmetical calculations (ḥisāb) and their applications to Islamic inheritance shares (farāʾiḍ) and sales. Trouillot demonstrates that West African scholars in the nineteenth  century practiced arithmetic as a way to express intellectual authority, as authors sought to propose mathematical word problems of increasing difficulty to one another.

Numbers of Sand has received the support of the Université Paris Cité, the Fulbright Program, the Library of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.