Alexis Trouillot – Assistant Professor

Alexis Trouillot is an intellectual historian of the 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, Frank Chapman’s Science and Africa, is an edition of one of the first history of mathematics in Africa written in North America: a 1966 manuscript by the African American political activist Frank Edgar Chapman Jr entitled Science and Africa: Essays on the Part Which People of Color Have Played in the Development of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics. As one of the first works on the history of mathematics written by an African American, Chapman’s Science and Africa is a fruitful starting point for thinking about how Black scholar-activists in the U.S. drew upon the work of scholars of the Black diaspora such as W.E.B Dubois and Frantz Fanon to reframe discussions of historians of science around the stakes of their field. In the case of Chapman, he argued that showing that the ownership of science was not only universal but also highly contextual, was the starting point of a claim to humanity that people of color could use to start revolutions.

 

His second 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.

 

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Courses offered by Professor Trouillot: