France and Haiti in Revolution: Race and the Rights of Man

Jeremy Popkin, Ph.D.
William T. Bryan Professor of History, University of Kentucky

Jeremy Popkin is the William T. Bryan Professor of history at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He has published 19 books and over 150 articles on the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the role of newspapers and the press in modern politics. He has received a National Humanities Center Fellowship, residency at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, a Guggenheim fellowship, Fulbright fellowship and NEH fellowship. He has held visiting professorships in Germany, Australia, and France. His book, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, published with Cambridge University Press in 2010 won the David Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the J. Russell Major Prize for the best book in French history from the American Historical Association. This book moves between events in the French Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue and debates regarding political rights for colonists, free people of color, and the abolition of slavery within the revolutionary legislatures back in France.

Lorelle Semley, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History and Director of the Africana Studies Center,
College of the Holy Cross

Lorelle Semley is Associate Professor of History, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Director of the Africana Studies Center at the College of the Holy Cross. She teaches courses in African history, French empire, gender, and the Atlantic world. Dr. Semley’s research spans continents, taking her from West Africa to France and the Caribbean. Her methods cross disciplines, incorporating texts, material culture, film, and literature. Her first book, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Indiana University Press, 2010) analyzes how politics intersected with family relations during three formative periods: the Atlantic slave trade, French colonialism, and trans-Atlantic travel between West Africa and Brazil. This past year, she published To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2017) which investigates how African people and their descendants around the French Atlantic engaged with discussions of human rights and political status during the revolutionary era.

Julia Gaffield, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History, Georgia State University

Julia Gaffield is Assistant Professor at Georgia State University, and the author of Haitian Connections: Recognition after Revolution in the Atlantic World (2015), awarded the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. Last year, she published an English-language annotated edition of the Haitian Declaration of Independence (2016). She is one of the most dynamic young scholars working in this field today embarking on a career that promises to transform what we know about early republican Haiti. She maintains a professional website:

https://juliagaffield.com/

She also provides early access to translations of archival documents regarding early Haitian history at the following address:

https://haitidoi.com/

Prof. Gaffield has received fellowships to conduct research in France, Great Britain, and throughout the Caribbean, and has a knack for locating important “lost” documents, such as her fortuitous find of Haiti’s founding document misfiled in the British Library, noted in the 2010 NY Times article linked below: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/world/americas/01document.html