Former Kellogg Doctoral Student Marlene Daut (PhD ‘09) recently had her book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (The University of North Carolina Press) selected as a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
The Frederick Douglass Book prize awards $25,000 to one outstanding non-fiction book published on the subject of slavery, resistance, or abolition. This prize is awarded by Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
Daut’s book explores the role of Haiti as the first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery. While surviving in a hostile surrounding environment, Haitians forged a path for universal freedom, forcing anticolonial, antiracist, and antislavery ideals into the modern political rhetoric. The book shows the ways in which the ideas of Haitian revolutionaries, political thinkers, and pamphleteers moved into the forefront during the Age of Revolution.
During her time with Kellogg, Daut was awarded a Kellogg Institute Graduate Research Grant to study Haitian Creole. Her work on this topic aided in the later writing of her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865. Daut is now a professor of French and African American studies at Yale University.