Marlene Daut
Marlene L. Daut
Professor of French, Black Studies, and History
Professor Daut teaches courses in anglophone and francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Primarily a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, she writes about the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media, especially as appears in film, television, and art.
She has been the recipient of several awards, grants, and fellowships for her contributions to historical and cultural understandings of the Caribbean, notably from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (NYPL), the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haitian Studies Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Robert Silvers Foundation. Her biography The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) won the 2026 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the 2025 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize, and the book was also a finalist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography. Her previous monograph, Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), is the co-winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Professor Daut is also the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool, 2015) and Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017).
She has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles, and her public-facing essays on Haitian history and culture have appeared in many magazines, newspapers, and journals including, The New Yorker (“What’s the Path Forward for Haiti?”), The New York Times (“Napoleon Isn’t a Hero to Celebrate”), Harper’s Bazaar (“Resurrecting a Lost Palace of Haiti”), Essence (“Haiti isn’t Cursed. It is Exploited”), The Nation (“What the French Really Owe Haiti”), and the LA Review of Books (“Why did Bridgerton Erase Haiti?”). To learn more about her publications, visit her personal website.
Daut is also a digital humanist and editor. She co-created and co-edits H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti; she has curated a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com; and she has also developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com. In addition, she currently edits the Global Black History and Theory section at Public Books and is series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press.