Marlene L. Daut, professor of French and Black studies at Yale University, has won another award for her book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025). Recently, Professor Daut received the University of Edinburgh’s James Tait Black Prize, the longest-running literary award in the United Kingdom. Her work was selected from over 500 submissions. As part of the award, Professor Daut receives a £10,000 prize.
The First and Last King of Haiti, an examination of the country’s revolutionary history through the life of Henry Christophe, has already received several scholarly awards, including the 2025 Haiti Book Prize. The book is the latest addition to Professor Daut’s bibliography, which includes numerous other award-winning publications, such as Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), and A History of Haitian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
A Yale faculty member since 2022, Professor Daut teaches courses on Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. She also serves as co-editor of global Black history and theory at Public Books and series editor of New World Studies at the University of Virginia Press.
Professor Daut is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English and French. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame.
