Marlene Daut is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Black Studies and of French in the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
A Yale faculty member since 2022, Professor Daut teaches courses in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her research on the history of the Caribbean has lead to several award-winning books, including her most recent monograph, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), as well 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).
Professor Daut 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. 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 holds a bachelor’s degree in English and French from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Vincent Brown is the David Brion Davis Professor of History in the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Brown came to Yale this summer after serving as the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African American Studies at Harvard University. His scholarly expertise centers on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, particularly regarding the early modern Atlantic world. He is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020).
A multimedia historian, Professor Brown is the principal investigator and curator for the animated map “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative.” He also produced and directed research for the short video series The Bigger Picture (2022) for PBS Digital Studios as well as the documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009). Additionally, Professor Brown was the executive producer, writer, and host for How Do You Remember the Days of Slavery? (2024), a documentary made by his co-founded production company, Timestamp Media.
Dr. Brown is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in history. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
