Currently serving as Assistant Provost for International Programs, Professor Toungara is an Africanist scholar who offers courses on West Africa, the African Diaspora and Women in Africa. Her research interests include West African intellectual history, indigenous thought, precolonial state formation, political culture and democratization within francophone African nations, with particular emphasis on Côte d'Ivoire. She has carried out archival research in several countries, including France (Colonial Archives at Aix-en-Provence), Senegal (National Archives and French West Africa Archives), Mali (National Archives) and Côte d'Ivoire (National Archives of Côte d'Ivoire, and holdings at the Ministry of Women's Condition, the National Assembly and Odienne Prefecture). In pursuing her interest in indigenous ideologies and the cultural foundations of contemporary African politics, Professor Toungara has collected hundreds of hours of oral testimonies in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire. She is the recipient of study and research awards from the Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hayes Program, Ministry of National Education of Côte d'Ivoire, Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia, the West African Research Association, and Howard University.

Professor Toungara is the author of over a dozen articles on the history of women, family, education, economy and politics of various West African communities. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Modern African Studies, Journal of African Studies, Journal of Social History, Annales de l'Université d'Abidjian, African Studies Review, Les cahiers de la paix, West African Research Association Newsletter, and others. She has contributed essays and chapters in African Women: States of Crisis (ed., Gwendolyn Mikell, 1996), The Younger Brother in Mande (eds. Jansen and Zobel, 1996), and The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World (1993) and is working on a book-length manuscript on political culture in the northwestern region of Côte d'Ivoire. She has presented numerous papers at the annual conferences of the African Studies Association, conferences at the University of Virginia, Howard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and others in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Chad, France and the Netherlands. Professor Toungara actively supports peace and development efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, and in June 2000 she was awarded a grant by the U.S. Institute for Peace for training of 15 African women in the gender studies conflict management and peace building.