As of August 2022, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is University Docent at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Alessandra is co-Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies with Marie-José Nzegou-Tayo. She is a board member of the Haitian Studies Associaton. She also worked closely with Cécile Accilien and Carlo A. Célius on the initiative https://www.istwart.com/, which launched in 2020. From 2018-22, she was Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean Series stewarding the publication of six books, including Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theaters, co-edited by Christian Flaugh and Lena Taub Robles and she remains on its Advisory Board. She is author of: a monograph titled Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015); the co-edited “Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet,” a special issue of Yale French Studies (2016), with Kaiama L. Glover, and also the co-edited The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (2016), with Kaiama L. Glover, Mark Schuller, and Jhon Picard Byron. Since moving to the Netherlands, she has sought to make more prevalent (alongside the work of colleagues Sony Jean Joseph, Esther Captain, Rachel Gillett, Kasia Mika, Wayne Modest, and resonating with René Koekkoek’s recent books) the often forgotten role Haiti has played in shaping northern European public life since the European enlightenment, through engaging history and pedagogy in a recent article co-authored with Darren Staloff on the legacy of the John Adams’ and John Quincy Adams’ presidencies, published as part Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando’s Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives.

Over the past two decades, she has maintained a double-career: one in Academe and the other in the cultural sector. Most recently, she served as Research Coordinator and Senior Researcher at the Research Center for Material Culture at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen in the Netherlands (2019-22), where she remains a Research Associate, working notably on Un/Engendering the Collections. Founded and headed by Wayne Modest, the role of the RCMC is to critically interrogate the historical legacies of ‘the ethnographic museum.’  She has a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which was the first explicitly feminist French studies department in the United States, and also boasts one of the most prominent African Studies programs in the world. She maintains an affiliation with the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York, often referred to as the "Harvard of the people," where she was formerly an Associate Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies and French at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center (City University of New York). She spent a decade working in cultural diplomacy, at the French Embassy in both Washington, D.C. and NYC, as well as at the Québec Government House in NYC.  She is also a graduate of: Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies and Black European Summer School. She is versed in scholarship about the Caribbean Enlightenment; the relationship between the French, Haitian, and US revolutions; the “DOM,” or the départements d’outre-mer; as well as poverty studies. She is a member of Villa Albertine selection committee. 

Recently, she has published a series of articles that interrogate what Sarah Phillips Casteel names “the rhetorical oppositionality  of ‘Black’ and ‘Jew’” as well as a series that thinks through Africana feminism and the notion of nomadism in dialogue with the work of novelist Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman Waberi.  Alessandra currently is affiliated with Het Instituut voor Cultuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (ICON) at Utrecht Universiteit.