Atim Mackin

Research Interests: 20th- and 21st-century West African francophone literature, media studies in the francophone world.

Atim Mackin is a PhD candidate in French at Harvard University, with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. His dissertation, “Déjà Vus”: The Collective Memory of Sexual Diversity in Francophone Africa, traces the shifting forms and functions through which textual narratives of African sexual and gender variance have been recorded, reimagined, and adjudicated in French from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His work on LGBTQI+ asylum seekers and SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) asylum narratives has been supported by the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative and the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy.