Marlene L. Daut, professor of French and of Black studies at Yale University, has received the 2025 Haiti Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association for her book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025).
In a post announcing Professor Daut’s award, the HSA wrote, “Through fine-grained analysis of letters, newspapers, and writings by figures such as Baron de Vastey, Daut vividly reconstructs the complex political and intellectual life of early nineteenth-century Haiti. Her work not only humanizes Christophe and his contemporaries but also illuminates the broader tensions and transformations of the post-revolutionary era. The book engages key historiographical debates while offering new insights into the Haitian Revolution, the formation of the early Haitian state, and the legacies of Black Atlantic humanism.”
At Yale, Professor Daut teaches courses in in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. She has authored several other books on Haitian history, including Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), which won the 2019 Haiti Book Prize, and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), which received the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Professor Daut earned her bachelor’s degree in English from French from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.