America250: Worlds of Revolution – Prof. Marlene Daut (February 18, 2026)

“From Slavery to Freedom: Haiti and Anticolonial Revolution”

A lecture by Professor Marlene Daut (Yale University)

This event will occur on February 18, 2026 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM in the Mortara Center for International Studies, 3600 N St NW, DC 20057. Attendance is free but registration is required.

This talk reframes the story of colonialism, slavery, and revolution, showing Haiti at the vanguard of the transatlantic abolitionist movement, and in so doing, challenging the notion that Africans and Black Americans were mere passengers on a seemingly linear road from slavery to freedom. As underscored in my book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, Atlantic World leaders perpetuated slavery until Haiti’s revolutionaries redefined it as a “crime against humanity.” Understanding this trajectory necessitates delving into over four hundred years of history, from European colonization to the rise of slavery and plantations in the Americas, to the pivotal role of Haiti’s revolution in sparking the Age of Abolition. Haiti was the driving force for abolition, and its profound influence stretches beyond inspiration, as Haitians actively contributed to the destruction of slavery throughout the Americas.

About the speaker

Marlene Daut is an award-winning author, scholar, and professor specializing in Haitian history and culture. Her most recent book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, explores the fascinating life of Haiti’s only king while delving into the complex history of a 19th-century Caribbean monarchy. Her other books include Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Liverpool UP, 2015); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017); and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Daut’s articles on Haitian history and culture have appeared in over a dozen magazines, newspapers, and journals.

Daut graduated from Loyola Marymount University with a B.A. in English and French in 2002 and went on to teach in Rouen, France as an Assistante d’Anglais before enrolling at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned a Ph.D. in English in 2009. Since graduating, she has taught Haitian and French colonial history and culture at the University of Miami, the Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Virginia, where she also became and remains series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press. In July 2022, she was appointed as Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University.

Worlds of Revolution: America250 as a Global Historical Event

Supported by the Georgetown University Office of the Vice President for Global Engagement, and coordinated between the GU Global Irish Studies Initiative and the GU Institute for Global History, “Worlds of Revolution” is one of Georgetown University’s signature contributions to the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution.

Reflecting on the American Revolution and its international legacies, the series will invite audiences to consider the concept of an “age of revolutions”, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. In this long era of revolts against monarchies and empires, rebellions against rulers and dynasties, rejections of longstanding ideas, and competing attempts to build new orders on the site of the old, some revolutions achieved their stated aims. Others did not. Yet all produced a much different world, one that “Worlds of Revolution” will seek to better understand with close looks at commonalities, differences, and connections between revolutionary experiences across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in addition to North America.