A decade ago, Notre Dame graduate student Marlene Daut received a Kellogg Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to continue her study of Haitian Creole.

“I thought you might be especially interested to know, therefore, that my first book has just been published,” she wrote recently.

The book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015), is the first systematic and comparative literary history of Haiti’s war of independence. Considering accounts by its actual and imagined participants, observers, survivors, and cultural descendants, the work draws on writing in English, French, German, and, yes, Haitian Creole.

Daut, who first studied Creole with mentor Karen Richman, a Kellogg faculty fellow, is now associate professor of English and cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University, where she directs the Africana Studies Certificate Program.

Read more about her work here.