Approaches to Haitian Biography: Narrating the Lives of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe
Featuring Marlene L. Daut (Yale University) and Julia Gaffield (William & Mary)
Thursday, November 6
6pm
Jones Hall 100A
Join us for a conversation with two preeminent scholars of Haiti as they discuss their new biographies of the country’s revolutionary founders. Julia Gaffield (William & Mary) will present I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom (Yale University Press, 2025) and Marlene Daut (Yale University) will present The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025).
Julia Gaffield is an associate professor of History at William & Mary and the interim editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution and I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom.
Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French, Black Studies, and History at Yale University. She is the author of four books, most recently Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), a finalist for the Cundill History Prize.
Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian, the Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French Studies, and the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies
