In addition to teaching, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is Research Coordinator/ Senior Researcher at the Research Center for Material Culture at NMVW, working under the aegis of Wayne Modest and Stijn Schoonderwoerd. In the past two decades, she has actively engaged in two professional trajectories: one in the academe; the other in cultural diplomacy.
From 2009-2019, Benedicty-Kokken served as Assistant professor and was promoted to Associate professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies and French at the Graduate Center CUNY (City University of New York) and the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City College of New York, where she received two teaching awards (divisional and college-wide) and a college-wide service award. Previously, she worked at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York as Director of Development and at the Québec Government Office in New York as Attachée for Inter-Governmental and Academic Affairs. Most recently she was a student at the Black European Summer School in Amsterdam and Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies in Granada.
She is Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean Series and a Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, as well as a member of the FACE Foundation’s French Voices selection committee.
She is author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lexington Books, 2015); second editor with Kaiama L. Glover of Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (2016), a special issue of Yale French Studies; and, co-editor with Kaiama L. Glover, Jean Picard Byron, and Mark Schuller of The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (Liverpool University Press, 2016).
Her most recent publications are “Raphaël Confiant and Jewishness, or the Fraught Landscapes of French, Martinican and Franco-Martinican Intellectualisms,” published in 2020 in Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman’s Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Atlantic Literature and Theory (University of Virginia Press, 2020); “’Bloodied Flower’: On Translating the Burden of the Floral in Marie Chauvet’s La Légende des fleurs” in Christian Flaugh and Lena Taub Robles, Marie Chauvet’s Theaters: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt (Brill, 2018): 220-29; and “A Polyvalent Mediterranean, or the trope of nomadism in the literary œuvre of Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman Waberi,” RELIEF. Revue éléctronique de littérature française. 11.2 (2017). Forthcoming are: an article titled, “A ‘New’ Antillean DOM Arts Scene, or the pragmatic aesthetics of patience: Artincidence, Annabel Guérédrat, Daniel Goudrouffe, and Henri Tauliaut, in dialogue with Jeannete Ehlers,” which is part of a Rutgers University Press volume edited by Adlai Murdoch, as well as an article on the role of Haiti in the presidencies of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, co-authored with historian Darren Staloff.
Her inquiry is highly informed by the pedagogical communities that she has had the fortune to be a part of: upon moving to the Netherlands, she had the privilege of teaching in various institutions: Radboud University; University of Amsterdam; Hogeschool Utrecht; University College Utrecht, whose Gender Studies Program, she has known about since her graduate school years at University of Wisconsin at Madison's French and Francophone Studies Department, to which one of her most cherished professor’s Elaine Marks often referred in admiration.