About

Marlene L. Daut is an award-winning author, scholar, and professor specializing in Haitian history and culture. Her most recent book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), has received significant recognition, winning the 2026 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, the 2025 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize, and being a finalist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize. Her other notable works include Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Liverpool UP, 2015), Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017), and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), which was co-winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Daut's scholarship has been widely published in prominent magazines, newspapers, and journals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, The Nation, and the LA Review of Books, where she explores themes related to Haitian history and culture. Daut has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships recognizing her contributions to the historical and cultural understanding of the Caribbean, including support from the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haitian Studies Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Robert Silvers Foundation. She earned her B.A. in English and French from Loyola Marymount University in 2002 and subsequently taught in Rouen, France as an Assistante d’Anglais. She completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Notre Dame in 2009. Since then, she has taught Haitian and French colonial history and culture at the University of Miami, Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Virginia, where she also serves as series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press. In July 2022, she was appointed Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University. She resides in the New Haven, CT area with her spouse and children.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Law
• History
• Computer Science
• Art
• Art history
• Literature
• Library science
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• What Is the American Declaration of Independence at 250 to Me?

  University of Virginia Press eBooks · 2026-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 200 years ago, France extorted Haiti in one of history’s greatest heists – and Haitians want reparations

  2025-04-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The First and Last King of Haiti

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2025-01-21

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Il y a 200 ans, la France extorquait une « indemnité » à Haïti, dans l’un des plus grands braquages de l’histoire – et les Haïtiens veulent des réparations

  2025-08-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How the Haitian Revolutionaries Led the World from Slavery to Freedom

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract What if much of our understanding of slavery’s abolition is misguided? Conventional narratives revolve around human rights advancements in the United States, Great Britain, and France. Such accounts typically begin with white Europeans from Spain and Portugal colonizing the Caribbean and the Americas, replacing native populations with captive Africans forced into harsh labor as slaves. The story continues with the rise of the plantation supported by the English, French, and Dutch and their advent of scientific racism. Next, abolitionist pamphlets and lectures culminated in bans on the international slave trade, hastened abolition in some regions, and led to the US Civil War ultimately ending slavery. Yet this narrative oversimplifies and distorts the reality. While abolitionists, revolutionaries, and lawmakers played roles, Haiti and its people are often excluded from the story. This chapter reframes the story of slavery and freedom showing Haiti at the vanguard of abolition and challenging the idea that Africans and Black Americans were mere passengers on a seemingly linear road from slavery to freedom. As the author underscores, Atlantic World leaders perpetuated slavery until Haiti’s revolutionaries redefined it as a “crime against humanity.” Understanding this trajectory necessitates delving into over four hundred years of history, from European colonization to the rise of slavery and plantations in the Americas, to the pivotal role of Haiti’s revolution in sparking the Age of Abolition. Haiti was the driving force for abolition, and its profound influence stretches beyond inspiration, as Haitians actively contributed to the destruction of slavery throughout the Americas.

  PublisherDOI

• Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Andrew S. Curran (eds.)

  New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2024-04-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• History, Politics, and Revolutionary Romanticism in Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s <i>Voyage dans le nord d’Hayti</i> (1824) and the Anonymously Published <i>L’Haïtiade</i> (ca. 1826)

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ‘Theresa’ To The Rescue! African American Women's Resistance and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution

  Direito Público · 2024-01-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  O texto a seguir compõe o sexto capítulo do livro Trópicos do Haiti: Raça e a história literária da Revolução Haitiana no Mundo Atlântico, 1789-1865, ainda sem tradução para o português. Nele, a autora reflete sobre a distribuição generificada de papeis na memória e nos registros literários sobre a Revolução Haitiana nas décadas que a seguiram. Para tanto, ela analisa o “Theresa, um conto haytiano”, assinado apenas como “S.” e veiculado no jornal afroamericano, Freedom's Journal. Neste dossiê, buscamos incitar as/os leitoras/es sobre a generificação do sujeito constitucional a partir das considerações feitas pela autora sobre dito conto e suas repercussões entre a comunidade de leitores da época mas também entre os críticos contemporâneos. Palavras-Chave: Revolução Haitiana; Literatura haitiana; Theresa, um conto haytiano; Raça

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Editors’ Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023

  Debates in the digital humanities · 2023 · 23 citations

  • Humanities
  • Sociology
  • Humanities

  Book synopsis: A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty&#13;\n&#13;\nWhere do the digital humanities stand in 2023? Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. Providing a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going, this fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series features both established scholars and emerging voices pushing the field's boundaries, asking thorny questions, and providing space for practitioners to bring to the fore their research and their hopes for future directions in the field. Carrying forward the themes of political and social engagement present in the series throughout, it includes crucial contributions to the field-from a vital forum centered on the voices of Black women scholars, manifestos from feminist and Latinx perspectives on data and DH, and a consideration of Indigenous data and artificial intelligence, to essays that range across topics such as the relation of DH to critical race theory, capital, and accessibility.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Karen Richman

  2 shared

• Bridget Whearty

  1 shared

• Carolina Villarroel

  1 shared

• Jeanelle D. Horcasitas

  1 shared

• Hilary N. Green

  1 shared

• Christina Boyles

  University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

  1 shared

• Lorena Gauthereau

  1 shared

• Alison Martin

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2025 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize for The First an…
• 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Awakening the Ashes:…
• Honorable mention for the 2024 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher…
• Honorable Mention for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Y…
• Honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize fo…