Overview:
Marlène L. Daut, Haitian American creator and Yale College professor and longtime scholar of Haitian historical past, has obtained the 2025 Haiti Ebook Prize for her e book on Henry Christophe. The award acknowledges her continued contributions to Haitian research and efforts to heart Haitian voices in historic scholarship.
NEWYORK. — Marlène L. Daut, a professor of French and Black research at Yale College, has gained the 2025 Haiti Ebook Prize for her newest e book on Haitian historical past, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported.
The Haitian Research Affiliation awarded the prize for The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, printed this yr by Alfred A. Knopf. The e book examines the life and rule of Henry Christophe, considered one of Haiti’s most influential post-independence leaders, utilizing letters, newspapers, and writings from the early nineteenth century.
In saying the award, HSA mentioned Daut’s work provides new insights into the Haitian Revolution, Haiti’s early political life and the concepts that formed the nation after the revolution. The e book additionally appears at how Black thinkers of the time debated energy, management, and freedom in a newly impartial nation.
“This e book provides new methods to grasp Haiti’s early political life and the thinkers who formed it.”
Daut shouldn’t be new to this recognition. She beforehand gained the Haiti Ebook Prize in 2019 for Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, a examine of one of many late King Christophe’s key advisers. Her 2023 e book, Awakening the Ashes: An Mental Historical past of the Haitian Revolution, later obtained the Frederick Douglass Ebook Prize.
At Yale, Daut teaches programs on Haitian, Caribbean, African American, and French colonial historical past and literature. Her work focuses on correcting how Haiti’s previous has been written and taught, particularly in tutorial areas which have lengthy ignored Haitian voices.
The Haitian American scholar reveals her journey from a California upbringing deep into Haitian historical past, unearthing “Haitianists” alongside the way in which, assembly the complicated “First and Final King of Haiti” in archives throughout continents and, now, wanting into her family’s roots.
In a latest interview with The Haitian Occasions, Daut mentioned Haitian students and writers should play a central position in telling Haiti’s historical past, slightly than permitting it to be formed primarily by international views. Her work, which focuses on Haitian intellectuals and political thinkers, is broadly utilized in college lecture rooms and steadily cited in discussions concerning the Haitian Revolution and Haiti’s world affect.
Daut earned her undergraduate diploma from Loyola Marymount College in Los Angeles and her doctorate from the College of Notre Dame. By her writing and educating, she continues to play a major position in increasing how Haiti’s historical past is studied and understood in america and past.