Marlene Daut selected as Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center Fellow

Marlene Daut, Professor of French and of Black Studies, has been selected as a 2026–2027 fellow of the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Daut is one of fifteen fellows selected from a pool of 800 applicants by the Cullman Center for its twenty-eighth class.

The Cullman Center, an international fellowship program, awards fellowships to scholars and writers who will “benefit directly from access to the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.” Fellows also receive a stipend of $90,000 and the use of a private office at the Cullman Center, located at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.  

During her fellowship, Daut will work on a new project: a biography of Jean-Pierre Boyer, a Haitian revolutionary turned president. Boyer is known for signing an 1825 agreement committing Haiti to pay 150 million francs to France as the price of French recognition of Haitian independence.

Cullman Center Fellows have access to the New York Public Library’s extensive research collections and resources for the duration of the fellowship, from September 2026 through May 2027.

“With projects that range from a biography of the Haitian president who agreed to pay France for his country’s independence, to a novel based on traditional Ghanaian folktales, to a play about a composer’s escape from the Soviet Union; this class of Cullman Center Fellows—chosen from the largest pool of applicants the Center has ever received—showcases the continuing vitality of research in the humanities,” said Salvatore Scibona, the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center. “At a time of retrenchment elsewhere in support for scholars and writers, the Library is expanding and celebrating it.”

Daut’s most recent book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), won the James Tait Black Prize in Biography, the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Haitian Studies Association Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Her other books include Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015), Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017), and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), which was selected as a co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.