Marlene L. Daut

Marlene L. Daut

Professor of French and African American Studies

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) and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). She is also co-editor (with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner) of the volume, Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA Press 2022). Her next book, an intellectual history of Haiti titled Awakening the Ashes, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press in fall 2023. Professor Daut is currently writing a narrative history of the kingdom of Haiti and biography of King Henry Christophe (under contract with Knopf/Pantheon).

As a public scholar, Professor Daut’s articles have appeared in 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 with Julia Gaffield 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 with Tao Leigh Goffe. She is also series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press.

Professor Daut has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.