Dominique Somda

Dominique Somda is a sociocultural anthropologist trained in France; she received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, where she was a member of the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative. As a postdoctoral researcher, she held visiting positions at the Fondation des Maisons des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and at the London School of Economics. She later taught anthropology as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Reed College in Portland, Oregon. More recently, she was a travelling faculty with the comparative study abroad programs IHP Cities and IHP Human Rights (School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont). Her work focusses on how inequality − or conversely egalitarianism − emerges through everyday practices, a thematic interest that has also led her to engage with the anthropology of slavery, democracy, Christianity, and feminist and postcolonial studies. Her regional focus is Madagascar. A dual citizen of Burkina Faso and France, she was born in Paris and raised in Cotonou, Benin.