1. The Language of Humanity

The Language of Humanity Professor of French Mohamed Kamara describes his interconnected teaching, scholarship and service.

By Kelsey Goodwin
November 3, 2025

"What's interesting to me is the human question: the relationships we have with each other, with the rest of the universe."

~ Mohamed Kamara, H. Laurent Boetsch, Jr. Term Professor of Romance Languages

A native of Sierra Leone who arrived at W&L nearly 25 years ago, Mohamed Kamara has become a beloved faculty member to many on campus. His courses, creative work and campus service all return to the same fundamental inquiry: how we understand and preserve human dignity, even in the face of violence, loss and fear.

Kamara is a professor of French and the current chair of the Romance Languages Department and has served as chair as well as a core faculty member of W&L's Africana Studies Program. Kamara's academic and creative work span the boundaries between language, literature, ethics and history. This fall, his French 273: Invitation au Voyage course focuses on how childhood is represented through literary analysis of literature and film from the Francophone world.

"We look at children as the perennial underclass," he explains. "We've all been through childhood, and most of us were treated as if we were not worth the caliber of the grown-ups around us. But children are smarter, more resilient and more generous than adults give them credit for. There's a lot we can learn from them. Children are not simply miniature versions of grown-ups."

His scholarship often centers on representations of children and violence, themes that overlap in his teaching. Kamara recently co-edited the book "Children and Violence: Agency, Experience and Representation in and Beyond Armed Conflict," published in collaboration with Mark Drumbl, Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and director of the Transnational Law Institute at Washington and Lee School of Law, and other colleagues. The volume examines violence in all its manifestations and continues a line of inquiry that has defined much of Kamara's intellectual life. His book "Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature: The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie," which also analyzes the representation and lasting impact of the colonial school and bourgeoise in Francophone sub-Saharan literature, was published in 2023. Kamara also recently delivered a lecture entitled "Reconceptualizing Humanitarianism" to mark his appointment to the H. Laurent Boetsch Jr. Term Professorship in International Education at W&L; his current research explores humanitarianism and how we undertake humanitarian actions as a research question.

"He's just an incredibly erudite person," Drumbl says. "What I admire most is his way of thinking about people ensnared in violence. He puts the human being back into human rights. A lot of people are good at the policy or legal side, but not with human beings. Mohamed is curious about the human condition, even in its darkest spaces."

Kamara's creative writing pushes the same questions further. His play, "When Mosquitoes Come Marching In," published in 2021, took him 20 years to complete. It draws from his experiences growing up in Sierra Leone and his reflections on the country's decade-long civil war.

"I knew I wanted to write something about the civil war in Sierra Leone," says Kamara. "But I was careful about how to tell the story. It's my story, but also not really my story." Kamara left Sierra Leone to come to the United States two years after the war began. After it was published, he sent the play to family and friends in Sierra Leone, encouraging them to share it with others who had direct experiences with the conflict so that he could get their thoughts as well.

"It's the story of those who were directly impacted by the war," he says. "I had to think about their perspective. How do you represent violence without making it sentimental or diminishing the value of the experience?"

He chose to write the play in a series of "spectacles," a deliberate nod to the performative nature of violence itself.

"War can become a kind of theater," Kamara says. "Violence is performed for others to see, to instill fear, to make a point. So, I called the scenes 'spectacles,' because that's what they were."

Kamara's path to academia began in the small town of Koidu, Sierra Leone.

"I was not a good student at first," he says with a smile. "But once I learned to study, nobody ever had to tell me again."

When one of his teachers urged his mother to send him to college, it changed the course of his life. Years later, the teacher's two sons attended W&L; the family recently visited Kamara at his home in Lexington, a moment he describes as connecting a decades-long story.

"There are no accidents," Kamara says. "We help (or hurt) people we don't even know through the things we do."

Kamara completed his B.A. in French and English and a diploma in secondary education from Fourah Bay College at the University of Sierra Leone. He spent his first year in America as an exchange student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. He went on to earn his master's in French at Purdue University and his Ph.D. in French at Tulane University. He joined Washington and Lee's faculty in 2001 after a friend convinced him to apply for what was then a one-year position.

"As soon as I arrived, I liked the place," he says. "The landscape reminded me of where I grew up: hilly and green. Twenty-five years later, I'm still here."

Kamara says the people he met during his first visit to campus, including then-Dean of the College Larry Boetsch and Cecile West-Settle, then-head of the Romance Languages Department, contributed to his decision to come to W&L.

Kamara's deep humanity is perhaps most visible in the way students describe him. Gracie Jorgensen '27, a biology major and philosophy minor from Macon, Georgia, took his French courses during her first year and later had him as an academic adviser.

"He was always encouraging," she says. "When you messed up, he didn't make you feel bad about it. He just nudged you in the right direction. Even after I declared my majors and switched advisers, we still say hi on campus, and I know I could go to him if I needed help. He genuinely cares about your success, even when it's not French-related."

For Anna Martin '28, who worked with Kamara through the Advanced Immersion and Mentoring (AIM) Program, his mentorship opened unexpected doors. As part of the program, she and her research partner helped Kamara compile a bibliography for his ongoing book project on humanitarianism.

"Working with him gave me such a leg up," Martin says. "I ended up landing a political communications internship because of the research and writing experience I gained that summer."

Kamara's recent teaching includes Spring Term Abroad courses in Barbados and Toulouse, France. His co-led 2024 course in Toulouse examined museums and the ethics of collecting, exploring how artifacts obtained through colonial conquest are displayed in Western institutions.

"Our goal was to get students to the point where they never visit a museum the same way again," he says. "We want them to ask, 'Where did this object come from? Who brought it here? What does it mean for the place it was taken from?'"

Adem Khelifi '27, a mathematics major with double minors in data science and computer science from Tunisia, got to know Kamara during his Spring Term Abroad course in Toulouse.

"It wasn't just teaching - it was always personal," he says. "When we talked about colonialism, he brought in his own experiences and asked about ours. He wanted to know where we came from and what home meant to us. Later, when my mother passed away, he was the first to email me. He checked on me for weeks. He's more than a professor - he's a mentor, a friend, a voice of wisdom."

In addition to his research on humanitarianism, he is also in the process of collaborating with a professor at another university on a book examining the concept of fear in African literature. The project explores fear as a complex psychological and social phenomenon, and the book will look at how it impacts human behavior and societal dynamics through the lens of contemporary African fiction.

"Fear is not always natural - it's also taught," he says. "We want to understand how it manifests and what it tells us about society."

In addition to his scholarship, Kamara has been a steady presence on university committees, from international education to task forces on campus culture and inclusion. As former chair of the International Education Committee, he helped push through policies that integrated financial aid with study abroad programs, ensuring all students could participate in Spring Term travel courses.

"When I serve on a committee, I ask how our decisions will impact every part of the university," he says. "We have to think about sustainable change, not simply change for its own sake."

That long view of growth, humanity and interconnection is what colleagues say defines Kamara.

"In a time of agitation, his voice is poised and steady," Drumbl says. "He believes in social change, but he delivers it in a way that's deeply soothing."

Tamara Futrell, dean for student engagement and leadership, oversees religious life on campus and has worked closely with Kamara over the years in his capacity as adviser to the university's Muslim student organization, Salaam. Kamara is a steady presence at Friday prayers held in the Sacred Space of Elrod Commons, and Futrell says his time and attention have provided a foundation for students of all faiths.

"He has participated in the panel discussion that we offer as part of the Leading Edge trip called Making Meaning," says Futrell, "where students have a chance to explore various spiritualities, religions and ideologies. He has interesting things to say about his own Muslim faith and is very well read in terms of other religions, and his perspective on being open and accepting toward other religions is inspiring to our students."

Abdurrafey Khan '17, now a digital systems and support specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, remembers Kamara as someone who helped infuse his W&L experience with a sense of belonging.

"I spent the summer of 2016, between my second and third years at W&L, working and staying on campus," Khan recalls. "It would be the first time I wasn't going home to my family for the summer. That year, the month of Ramadan aligned with the beginning of summer, and the celebration of Eid al-Fitr (which concludes Ramadan), landed on my birthday. I don't think I'd celebrated either occasion alone before, without my family. Professor Kamara offered to take me to Charlottesville for the Eid prayer with his family. We drove there together, and we did the prayer at the mosque he usually attended and then I spent the morning with him before I headed into Charlottesville. It was an incredibly auspicious day for me - I think literally once in a lifetime - and it meant so much to me that he was willing to enable it for me and experience it with me. It set the tone for many of my relationships with other adults at W&L, and it was an important reminder that even if I were miles away from home and felt alone, there were folks in the W&L community like Mohamed Kamara who could make it feel like home."

Kamara says he is always looking for opportunities to relate to others.

"What's interesting to me is the human question: the relationships we have with each other, with the rest of the universe. Whatever we do affects everything else," Kamara says. "I don't look at life as discrete events. My teaching, my scholarship and my service are all connected. There's a line, visible or invisible, that connects everything and everyone."

"We are all complex beings," he continues. "There's no single identity that defines us. Whatever is done to one affects all the others."

For Kamara, the classroom remains the heart of his vocation.

"I always tell my students, 'You'll never have four years like this again,'" he says. "'Never again will you be at a place where virtually everyone works for your improvement and where you have this much freedom to learn, to ask questions, to see the world.'"

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