Marlene L. Daut co-edits the Global Black History section of Public Books. She is Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University and author of Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), co-winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize; Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). Her biography of Henry Christophe, The First and Last King of Haiti (Knopf, 2025) won the 2026 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the 2025 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.
Marlene L. Daut
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Writing on Public Books
“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
“This way of going about prophecy sadly replaces the historical fact of Black victory with a timeless failed rebellion. Too bleak, if you ask me.”
“Independence and Abolition Went Hand in Hand”: Julia Gaffield on Jean-Jacques Dessalines
“Securing the first permanent, universal, and immediate abolition of slavery was Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s legacy.”
How Haiti Destroyed Slavery and Led the Way to Freedom throughout the Atlantic World
Not the United States, Great Britain, France, or any other enslaver deserves credit for ending slavery. Atlantic abolition began with Haiti.
Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”
