Marlene L. Daut Receives Honorable Mention from Modern Language Association
Daut's widely celebrated book Awakening the Ashes received an honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies.
Marlene L. Daut, Professor of French and of African American Studies, received an Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her widely celebrated book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies is awarded annually by the Modern Language Association of America to an “outstanding” scholarly work in French or Francophone linguistic or literary studies.
Awakening the Ashes “situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions.”
The selection committee wrote that Daut’s book “creates an original structure that gives voice to many who spoke against the French colonial system, slavery, and racism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” and that her work “demonstrates the ingenuity, historical significance, and transformative power of this critique articulated in Haitian creole and other Indigenous forms on the island as well as in French.”
In addition to this prize from the MLA, Awakening the Ashes won the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Yale Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Daut’s book also received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society, and was a finalist for the 2024 Pauli Murray Book Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society.