Marlene L. Daut

An award-winning author, scholar, and professor specializing in Haitian history and culture, her most recent book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), winner of the James Tait Black Prize in Biography and the Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, explores the fascinating life of Haiti’s only king while delving into the complex history of a 19th-century Caribbean monarchy. 

Daut's other books 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); and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. 

She has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles, and her essays 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 (“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?”). 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 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, and the Robert Silvers Foundation.

Daut 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 she earned a Ph.D. in English in 2009. Since graduating, she has taught Haitian and French colonial history and culture at the University of Miami, the Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Virginia, where she also became and remains series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press. Appointed to the faculty at Yale University in 2022, she is currently the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Black Studies and French.

Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 2026-27, she will be in residence from September to May at the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers (NYPL) as the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow.