Marlene L. Daut

Author
Marlene L. Daut
Marlene L. Daut

An award-winning author, scholar, and professor specializing in Haitian history and culture, Marlene L. Daut's most recent book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), explores the fascinating life of Haiti’s only king while delving into the complex history of a 19th-century Caribbean monarchy. Her 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.

Daut's 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?”). 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 Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haitian Studies Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the Robert Silvers Foundation for The First and Last King of Haiti. 

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. In July 2022, she was appointed as Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University.

She lives in the New Haven, CT area with her spouse and children.

Books

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The First and Last King of Haiti

The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

Named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

The essential biography of the controversial freedom-fighter, revolutionary, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. In The First and Last King of Haiti, a...

The First and Last King of Haiti (UK edition)

The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

The dramatic story of a pivotal figure in the Haitian Revolution, who shook the Atlantic world to its core.

Born to an enslaved mother in Grenada, Henry Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before joining the Black freedom fighters of Saint-Domingue in their quest to gain independence from France. But, at one point,...

Awakening the Ashes

An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution

Co-winner, Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Society for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

Gold Prize, Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE)

Named a finalist for the 2024 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History

Honorable mention for the 2024 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize at...

Other Writing

200 years ago, France extorted Haiti in one of history’s greatest heists –

In 2002, Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide argued that France should pay his country US$21 billion.

The reason? In 1825, France extracted a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence.

April 17, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of that indemnity agreement. On Jan. 1 of this year, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, reminded France of this call when he requested that France “repay the...

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How Haiti Destroyed Slavery and Led the Way to Freedom Throughout the

In this series commissioned by Marlene L. Daut, scholars reveal what 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT

The first land to be colonized in the Americas was Haiti. Europeans first enslaved native Americans and captive Africans there, too. But the first permanent abolition of slavery also happened on Haiti, in 1804: 220 years ago this month. Such abolition only occurred in the rest...

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André Rigaud: Napoleon’s Man in Haiti An exiled revolutionary, André

An exiled revolutionary, André Rigaud’s return to the island of his birth changed Haiti’s political destiny. Was he sent back to help reinstate slavery? His enemies would have us believe so.

In 1893 the Black American playwright William Edgar Easton published Dessalines, a Dramatic Tale: A Single Chapter From Haiti’s History, a play about the Haitian Revolution. Ostensibly a biopic of independent Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the play prominently featured another of the...

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Latest Updates

A painful anniversary puts renewed focus on Haiti’s demands for reparations

April 17th is the 200th anniversary of the indemnity "agreement" with France that was a condition for French recognition of Haitian independence. Over the next 122 years, Haiti...

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Recalling the life of Henry Christophe, Haiti’s first and last king

Recalling the life of Henry Christophe, Haiti’s first and last king


In a new book, Yale’s Marlene Daut follows the remarkable trajectory of Christophe’s life and Haiti’s...

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"The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise of Henry Christophe'" featured

Hosted on WTNH/ABC's Good Morning Connecticut, scholar Marlene L. Daut unravels the enigma that was Henry Christophe, the revolutionary, freedom-fighter, and only king of Haiti....

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Blog

An oldie, but goodie! On Haiti's Constitutional History Way back in 2019,

Way back in 2019, phew!, what a different, but also similar world it was then. We were pre-pandemic, but prime Trump, and I am now at Yale, not the University of Virginia, but universities and academia are still under attack, and even more so..... Sigh....

Well, today, because it is still Haitian Heritage Month, and I want to keep the hope alive, I am resurrecting one of my first forays into public-facing scholarship. In April 2019, I partnered with WAMU/NPR's show "The Academic Minute" to...

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On This Day in Haitian History (May 8, 1778): Queen Marie-Louise (Coidavid)

Although my recently published book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) naturally focuses on the king himself, his wife Queen Marie-Louise is a central force throughout, and her own biography reveals complex layers to the story of the Haitian Revolution, Haitian independence, and the rise of the Kingdom of Haiti.

I wrote about Queen Marie-Louise's journey after her husband's tragic death in this excerpt adapted from my book (originally...

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Four Haitian Novels that Beautifully Blend History, Memory, and Reality I

I initially wrote this article following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse after one Haitian official requested that the U.N. and U.S. send troops to help stabilize the nation. As can be imagined, many Haitian activists and artists recoiled at the prospect of yet another outside intervention.

The Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat is one artist who has repeatedly railed against past U.S. occupations of Haiti. In her foreword to Jan J. Dominique’s “...

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