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), won the James Tait Black Prize in Biography, the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, the Haitian Studies Association Book Prize, and the Phillis Wheatley Literary Award from the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage. The book was also a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. 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 (“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. In July 2022, she was appointed as Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University.

Named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026, she lives in the New Haven, CT area with her spouse and children.