Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: Recuperating Forgotten Narratives (Marlene Daut)

Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Recuperating Forgotten Narratives’ we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable?

This is the fifth event in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series, The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During Stanford University's 2023-24 academic year, the Sawyer Seminar Series will convene scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and personal standpoints to discuss the data that has saturated our world. Professor Marlene Daut will talk about how digitizing and making accessible early 19th-century Haitian print culture can act as a kind of counter-exhibit, both to actual exhibits and in general to the way that Haiti is portrayed across various types of media. Following the talk, there will be a response by Matt Randolph (PhD candidate in History at Stanford). 

If you cannot attend in person, you can register for a Zoom link here.

Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University. Her books include Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World; Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism; and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. Her articles on Haitian history and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, The Nation, and the LA Review of Books. She has won several awards, grants, and fellowships for her contributions to historical and cultural understandings of the Caribbean, notably from the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haitian Studies Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently, she won a grant from the Robert Silvers Foundation for her forthcoming biography, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.  She is also co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti with Julia Gaffield and curator of a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com ; see also her online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com