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 Jr’s Science and Africa, is a critical edition of one of the first text entirely devoted to the history of Science in Africa written in the United State. Written from prison by a Black man in his twenties, Science and Africa is a powerful reminder of what is at stake when one writes about History.
His second 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.