Marlene L. Daut

I am an author, scholar, editor, and professor. I have published four single-authored books, which 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); Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023); and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025).

My articles on Haitian history and culture have appeared in over a dozen 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 (“Resurecting 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?”). I have been the lucky recipient of several awards, grants, and fellowships for her contributions to historical and cultural understandings of the Caribbean, notably from the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haitian Studies Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a grant from the Robert Silvers Foundation for The First and Last King of Haiti.

I graduated from Loyola Marymount University with a B.A. in English and French in 2002 and went on to teach in Rouen, France as an Assistante d’Anglais before enrolling at the University of Notre Dame, where I earned a Ph.D. in English in 2009. Since graduating, I have taught Haitian and French colonial history and culture at the University of Miami, the Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Virginia, where I also became and remain series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press. In July 2022, I was appointed as Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University.

I live in the New Haven, CT area with my spouse and children. less