Rites and Wrongs in Atlantic West Africa: Female Sexualities, Indigenous Cosmologies, and Legal Authorities, explores the intersecting histories of sexuality, religion, and law in societies in the littoral regions of modern-day Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin. This project will examine from a comparative transregional perspective how practitioners of indigenous African religions from the sixteenth to the twentieth century controlled female sexuality through spiritual taboos and criminal penalties. It seeks to answer the following questions: In each of these three Atlantic regions, how did the transformation of certain sexual encounters into prohibited taboos or ritual crimes enhance specific forms of patriarchal authority and undermine others? How did West African women accept, police, challenge, and defy these regulations in their daily lives? How did existing precolonial moral codes influence how groups and individuals in French West Africa engaged the same colonial legal system in creative ways that reflected historically situated local sexual mores?