Featured Guests and Conveners

Laurent Dubois is the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor of the History & Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia, and Co-Director of the Democracy Initiative. From 2007, to 2020, he was a Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University, where he was Co-Director of the Haiti Laboratory from 2010-13 and founded and directed the Forum for Scholars and Publics from 2013 to 2020. He has written about the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean, with Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004), which won four book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Prize. His 2012 Haiti: The Aftershocks of History was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also written about the politics of soccer, with Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018). His work on the cultural history of music, The Banjo: America’s African Instrument (2016), was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. His most recent book is Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), co-authored with Richard Turits. His writings on music, history and sport have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and Sports Illustrated. 

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Barnard College Digital Humanities Center. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon and of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. She is also the co-editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, of The Haiti Exception, and of the Duke Haiti Reader. Kaiama has published numerous translations, including Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams, and Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women. She is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal for Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. Kaiama is currently a Fellow at the NYPL Cullman Center where she is working on an intellectual biography, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life.”

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). She is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mmimo of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She is guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017). Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections.

Crystal Eddins is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and holds a dual major PhD in African American & African Studies and Sociology from Michigan State University. She teaches courses on African Diaspora theory; slavery, race, and colonialism; and social justice movements. Her research on African Diaspora consciousness, historical sociology, social movements, marronnage and the Haitian Revolution has appeared in the Journal of Haitian Studies, Gender & History, and the Haitian History Journal. She has also contributed writings to public online platforms such as the AAIHS blog Black Perspectives, the Age of Revolutions blog, Public Books, and the Mobilizing Ideas blog. Her work has been supported by the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies; the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies; Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and John Carter Brown Library; and the National Science Foundation Sociology Program Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award. Eddins’ book, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It examines networks between enslaved people, maroons, and a small number of free people of color, built in ritual space and during marronnage, that helped facilitate the racial solidarity that influenced the Haitian Revolution’s success.

Chelsey L. Kivland is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, where she writes and teaches about street politics, insecurity, and social performance in contemporary Haiti and the broader Caribbean. She is the author of Street Sovereigns: Young Men and the Makeshift State in Urban Haiti (Cornell University Press, 2020), which analyzed the potential and challenges of organizing politically in urban contexts characterized by poverty, insecurity, and governmental neglect. Her current project explores changing notions of citizenship, statehood, and the social contract through an ethnography of the global regulatory regime of criminal deportation, as manifested between the United States and Haiti.

Nathalie Frédéric Pierre is an Assistant Professor of African Diaspora in the Department of History at Howard University. She earned her PhD in the history of the African Diaspora with an emphasis on the Caribbean and Latin America from New York University. She is currently writing her first book, “‘The Vessel of Independence… Must Save Itself’: Haitian State Formation, 1757 – 1815.” It articulates the political thought of Haitian statesmen, who were bound to preserve antislavery and create a government suitable for emancipated citizens of African origin in a revolutionary Atlantic world still reliant on enslaved labor. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of the City University of New York in the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), a Black Studies Dissertation Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at Howard University. Public engagement is a critical part of her work; and, after surviving the 2010 Haitian earthquake, she became board chair (2011 – 2017) of the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, an immigrant education advocacy group serving migrant Haitian teens and their families.

Marlene L. Daut is professor of American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool UP, 2015); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism  (Palgrave, 2017); and co-editor of the forthcoming Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (U. of Virginia Press, 2021). Daut is also the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti and curates a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com. Her bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 can be viewed at: http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com.

Mame-Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Identités Françaises (Brill, 2019). Her recent research examines the development of Afro-French identities. Her work has been featured in edited volumes and academic journals among which Contemporary French Civilization, Présences Francophones and “Racismes de France” . Mame is also a photographer and the co-author of a photo series on Black French Islam. In 2015, she co-directed “Mariannes Noires: Mosaïques Afropéennes”, a film in which seven Afro-French women investigate the pieces of their mosaic identities, and unravel what it means to be Black and French, Black in France. Dr. Niang is currently working on a second manuscript tentatively titled Mosaica Nigra: Blackness in 21st-century France.

Brandon R. Byrd is a historian of Black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on Black internationalism. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and the co-editor of two forthcoming books, including, with Chelsea Stieber, a critical translation of Louis-Joseph Janvier’s Haïti aux Haïtiens (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). His scholarship has been published by Slavery and Abolition, Diplomatic History, The Journal of African American History and other academic journals as well as popular periodicals, including GQ, The Undefeated, and The Washington Post. In addition to his scholarship, Byrd is also a co-editor of the Black Lives and Liberation series published by Vanderbilt University Press. He teaches at Vanderbilt University, where he is an Associate Professor of History.

Shelby M. Sinclair is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the departments of History and African American Studies. Her areas of specialization include nineteenth and twentieth century African American history, modern Caribbean history, Black feminist theory, and the history of U.S. empire. Her research examines Black women’s lives and labors during the 19-year U.S. military occupation of Haiti. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Gason konn bouke, men pa fanm: Black Women Workers and the United States Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934),” traverses the Black Republic from the bustling urban marketplace to the beleaguered countryside to find laboring women and tell their stories. Her work has been supported by the Coordinating Council of Women Historians, Institute for Citizens and Scholars, Social Science Research Council, and the National Humanities Center. Shelby holds a B.A. with honors from Stanford University where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and an M.A. from Princeton University.

Chelsea Stieber is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Catholic University of America. She is the author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (New York University Press, 2020) and co-editor, with Brandon Byrd, of the forthcoming critical translation of Louis Joseph Janvier’s Haiti for the Haitians (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Her scholarship and essays have appeared in academic journals including Francosphères, French Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization, and digital platforms such as Africa is a Country, The Abusable Past (RHR), and Public Books. She is currently working on a new project on Caribbean Fascism, for which she was awarded an ACLS fellowship for the academic year 2020–2021.