Assistant Professor
Licence de philosophie, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
Maîtrise, Histoire de la philosophie, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
Ph.D., French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University
Phone: (225) 578-6627
E-mail: mchalm1@lsu.edu
Office: 408 Hodges
Mehdi E. Chalmers is Assistant Professor in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University. A poet and translator as well as a scholar, he works across French, Haitian Creole, and English, and his current research concentrates on three interconnected areas of Francophone studies: the making of Creole as a literary language in twentieth-century Haiti; the poetics of Afro-diasporic cosmologies; and Caribbean intellectual history, particularly the entanglements of Surrealism, Négritude, and Marxism in the francophone Caribbean.
Professor Chalmers’s book project, Kreyòl Says Kreyòl Sees: Own-Languages in 20th Century Haitian Poetry, treats Haitian poetry as a site of philosophical and aesthetic invention where sovereignty and community are articulated through language and rhythm. The project develops four conceptual tools: Kreyòling, the Own, Nanchon poetics, and the pè-savann function. M. Chalmers reads Haitian poetics alongside the work of Henri Meschonnic, Kamau Brathwaite, and Édouard Glissant.
Recent and forthcoming publications extend this work in several directions: a study of pilgrimage and spiritual apprenticeship in Joséphine Bacon's Un thé dans la toundra / Nipishapui nete mushuat (L'Esprit Créateur 65.3), an essay on Afro-Caribbean reimaginings of the territory of ‘Guinée’ across Vodou, music, and poetry (Francosphères), a co-authored chapter on the globalization of Haitian konpa in the 1970s (Transatlantic Song and Music, eds. Hebblethwaite, Jansen, and Meehan), and an entry on Port-au-Prince co-written with Martin Munro for the Cambridge History of Surrealist Poetry. Earlier essays on the poet Inéma Jeudi and on the storyteller Maurice Sixto appeared in Conjonction, and a study of Michaël Ferrier and Kuki Shūzō in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES.
Alongside his scholarship, Professor Chalmers has published five collections of poetry in French and Kreyòl: Jaillir est la solution (Atelier Jeudi Soir, 2014), À partir du mensonge (C3 Éditions, 2016), Mer libre et autres lieux imaginaires (Le Temps des Cerises, 2019), Kat pwen Kadino with Inéma Jeudi (Gouttes-Lettres, 2022), and the triptych Jou bare, Kaye bwouyon, and Koda Kreyòl (Gouttes-Lettres, 2025). His poems have appeared in multiple journals in 2 anthologies, one edited by James Noël and the other by Lyonel Trouillot.
As a translator he was co-editor and co-translator of the Anthologie bilingue de la poésie créole de 1986 à nos jours (Actes Sud, 2015); translations of Inéma Jeudi's Gouyad Legede and Jean-Claude Charles's Négociations are forthcoming.
This creative work is inseparable from a long practice of editorial and cultural organizing in Haiti. Professor Chalmers is a co-founder and editorial board member of the multidisciplinary Haitian journal Trois/Cent/Soixante, has served on the editorial boards of Conjonction and dEmanbrE, and has been a member of the Atelier Jeudi Soir, the Port-au-Prince literary workshop, since 2013. He has organized editing and poetry workshops with the Alliances françaises of Jacmel, Les Cayes, and Cap-Haïtien, and co-organized the Winthrop-King symposium "Women Words: Caribbean Worlds" at Florida State University.
Professor Chalmers has given keynote lectures at Kenyon College and at Kalamazoo College, and has presented his research at the Society for Postcolonial French Studies in London, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and the American Academy of Religion, among others. Before entering the academy in the United States, he taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Port-au-Prince and at the Cours Privés Edme, and worked for a decade as a bookseller at the Librairie Tschann in Paris and the Librairie La Pléiade in Port-au-Prince. He is a graduate from Florida State University and Université Paris IV Sorbonne.
Areas of Interest
Poetry and aesthetics, Haitian and francophone Caribbean literature, Creole poetics;
rhythm and prosody Vodou and Afro-diasporic cosmologies Surrealism, Négritude, and
Marxism Caribbean decolonial theory and intellectual history French philosophy and
philosophy of language Literary translation.