Marlene Daut

Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies

320 York St.

BA in English and French, Loyola Marymount University; PhD English, University of Notre Dame

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.

Her books include:
•    Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015)
•    Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), co-winner of the HSA Book Prize.
•    Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), co-winner of the 2024

Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
• The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025).

She is co-editor of the following volumes:
•    Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA Press, 2022)
•    Anthologie de la pensée noire (Éditions Hors d’Atteinte, 2023)
•    A History of Haitian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Professor Daut’s public-facing articles have appeared in The New Yorker; The New York Times; The Nation; Essence Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Avidly: A Channel of the LA Review of Books; The Conversation; and Public Books, among others. Her peer-reviewed articles can be found in journals such as, New Literary History, archipelagos, Small Axe, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and more.

Daut is also the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti and curates a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com. She has also developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com and co-edits the Global Black History and Theory section at Public Books. She is series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press.

Department:

French