Marlene Daut

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 and television.

Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015); Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023); and the forthcoming The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025). She is also co-editor (with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner) of the volume, Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA Press, 2022).

As a public scholar, Professor Daut’s 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 also series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press.