Marlene L. Daut, a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, has been named the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Black Studies and of French, effective July 1.
She joined Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2022.
Her most recent book, "The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe" (Knopf, 2025), won the 2026 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography, the 2026 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, the 2025 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize. Her previous book, "Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution" (UNC Press, 2023), was the co-winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded by Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Daut is also the author of "Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865" (Liverpool, 2015) and "Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism" (Palgrave, 2017). She has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles, and her public-facing essays on Haitian history and culture have appeared in many magazines, newspapers, and journals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, Essence, and other outlets.
In recognition of her scholarly contributions to historical and cultural understandings of the Caribbean, Daut has been the recipient of several awards, grants, and fellowships, notably from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial 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, the National Humanities Center, and the Robert Silvers Foundation.
She is also a digital humanist and editor. She co-created and co-edits H-Net Commons' digital platform, "H-Haiti;" curates a website on early Haitian print culture; and developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900. In addition, she currently edits the Global Black History and Theory section at Public Books and is series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press. She is an outstanding teacher, leading courses at the graduate and undergraduate level, and mentor, who has served as a senior thesis advisor and on the qualifying exams committee for numerous students.
Daut received her B.A. from Loyola Marymount University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Notre Dame.
