Overview:
Marlène L. Daut, Haitian American creator and Yale College professor and longtime scholar of Haitian historical past, has acquired the 2025 Haiti E-book Prize for her ebook on Henry Christophe. The award acknowledges her continued contributions to Haitian research and efforts to middle Haitian voices in historic scholarship.
NEWYORK. — Marlène L. Daut, a professor of French and Black research at Yale College, has received the 2025 Haiti E-book Prize for her newest ebook 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 ebook examines the life and rule of Henry Christophe, one in every of Haiti’s most influential post-independence leaders, utilizing letters, newspapers, and writings from the early nineteenth century.
In asserting 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 ebook additionally appears to be like at how Black thinkers of the time debated energy, management, and freedom in a newly unbiased nation.
“This ebook 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 received the Haiti E-book 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 ebook, Awakening the Ashes: An Mental Historical past of the Haitian Revolution, later acquired the Frederick Douglass E-book 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 educational 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 best way, assembly the advanced “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 overseas views. Her work, which focuses on Haitian intellectuals and political thinkers, is broadly utilized in college school rooms and incessantly cited in discussions in regards to 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. Via her writing and instructing, she continues to play a big position in increasing how Haiti’s historical past is studied and understood in america and past.