Michelle Bumatay, (PhD, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA) is an Assistant Professor of French specializing in African Francophone literature and visual culture. Her current book project, Black Bandes Dessinées, describes the development of Francophone comics by cartoonists from Sub-Saharan Africa and investigates cartoonists’ verbal-visual strategies in their representations of everyday life in Africa and the Diaspora. She is the 2015 recipient of the Annual Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award for her conference paper, "Notre histoire and Madame Livingstone: Travels in Time" and she has published in Contemporary French Civilization, Études francophones, European Comic Art, Alternative Francophone, Research in African Literatures, and Francosphères. She is also the organizer of the Winthrop-King Institute’s Global Africas series.

Research Interests

African Francophone literature, culture, and history

Film, Media, and Comics Studies

Postcolonial theory

Migration Studies

Genocide Studies

Courses Taught

(Post)Colonial Migration

Education and Identity in Francophone Africa: Literature, Film, and Graphic Novels.

Dessinatrices francophones (Francophone Women Cartoonists).

Caribbean Literature in French.

The Francophone Novel: L’Algérie de qui ? (Whose Algeria?).

The French Novel and Cinema: Immigration and Identity.

Selected Publications

• “Comics as Commemoration? The tirailleurs sénégalais and World War I.” Francosphères vol. 10 no. 1 (2021) 63-77.
• “Picturing the (Silent) History of Immigration in France and in French Bandes Dessinées,” in Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, ed. Nhora Serrano (Routledge, 2021) 149-161.
• “BD reportage or Exotic Travel Journal?: L’Afrique de papa and the Intermedial Gaze,” in Études Francophones 32 (2020) 13-35.
• “African Bande Dessinée Festivals & Competitions: Participation, Patronage, and Performance.” Research in African Literatures 50.2 (2019) 35-48.
• “The 4th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay: Notre histoire and Madame Livingstone: travels in time.” Contemporary French Civilization 42.2 (2017) 141-169.
• “Plural Pathways, Plural Identities: Jean-Philippe Stassen’s ‘Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,’” in Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities, eds. Benita Mehta and Pia Mukherji (Routledge, 2015) 29-43.
• “Postcolonial Interjections: Jean-Philippe Stassen Illustrates Heart of Darkness and We Killed Mangy-Dog,” Alternative Francophone 1.8 (2015) 18-36.
• “Humor as a Way to Re-Image and Re-Imagine Gabon and France in La vie de Pahé and Dipoula” European Comic Art 5.2 (2012) 45–66.