This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Marlene Daut, who teaches in the Departments of French and African American Studies at Yale University. Along with numerous articles in public and scholarly venues, she is the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2015); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (2017); Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (2023); and most recently The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the place of Haiti in the Black Studies imagination, the creative and archival dimension of writing history, and the significance of transnational study in the field.