Fanm Rebèl: Excavating the Histories of Haiti's Women Revolutionaries

We were delighted to have hosted Nicole Willson (UCLAN-IBAR) as our distinguished guest speaker at the very well attended virtual event part of our Caribbean Studies seminar series last night. ‘The history of Haiti has been entirely written by men and for men, and one hardly finds any trace of women, of their moral, social and economic influence.’ With this quote by Madeleine Sylvain Boucherou, Dr Willson ended her presentation on the fascinating yet sobering histories of Haiti’s revolutionary women.

In this seminar, Dr Willson talked about the challenges and scholarly imperative of resurrecting Haiti’s women revolutionaries from archival silence. She talked about some of the important discoveries that she has made in attempting to excavate these narratives, shedding light on the stories of women that have been too often consigned to the margins, and looking at examples of recovery in the archives of imagination and creativity across the Black Atlantic.

Nicole Willson is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire's Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR). After completing her PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2016, Nicole worked at the Universities of Greenwich and Kent and, from 2018-2019, served as the Postdoctoral Research Associate on Celeste-Marie Bernier's AHRC-funded project Our Bondage and Our Freedom: Frederick Douglass and Family (1818-2018) at the University of Edinburgh.