Laurent Dubois is a professor of romance studies and history and the director of the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke University. From 2010 to 2013, he was the co-director of the Haiti Laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Institute. He is the author of six books. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution was selected as a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and has been published in translation in Haiti under the title Les Vengeurs du Nouveau Monde by Éditions de l’Universite d’État d’Haïti. His Haiti: The Aftershocks of History was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His most recent book is The Banjo: America’s African Instrument.
Robert Fatton Jr. is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His books include Black Consciousness in South Africa; The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal’s Passive Revolution, 1975–1985; Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa; Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy; The Roots of Haitian Despotism; and Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery. He is also co-editor, with R. K. Ramazani, of The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World; and Religion, State, and Society.
Scott Freeman, an environmental anthropologist, focuses on environmental development initiatives in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He is currently a professorial lecturer at the School of International Service at American University, and he recently completed his PhD at Columbia University. His work has appeared in Anthropology News and the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. He is writing a book on the intersection of the development “project” and soil conservation and agricultural practices in Haiti.
Nicholas Johnson is an undergraduate student in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he studies international development and economics. He has worked for the Focus On Haiti Initiative at the Elliott School since 2013, where he coordinated the symposium “Who ‘Owns’ Haiti? Sovereignty in a Fragile State: 2004–2014” in 2014 and the symposium “Voices of Haiti’s Voiceless: Post-Earthquake Aspirations & Achievements” in 2015. He received undergraduate research fellowship awards from the Elliott School in 2014 and 2015 to study rural development strategies in Marmelade, Haiti, and the role of information communication technologies in international development.
Chelsey Kivland, a cultural anthropologist, focuses on street politics, everyday insecurity, and social performance in contemporary urban Haiti. A recent PhD from the University of Chicago, she is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She has published articles in Cultural Anthropology, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Journal of Haitian Studies. She is preparing a book titled Street Sovereigns: Young Men in Search of the State in Urban Haiti, which traces how local forms of governance interact with a range of state and NGO actors and the conflicts those interactions produce.
Robert Maguire is professor of international development studies and former director of the Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He has worked for years on issues of bottom-up development in post-plantation societies in the Americas, including Louisiana, where he conducted PhD research, and in Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean. He is recognized as a leading U.S. expert on Haiti, having been engaged with that country since 1974. His book Bottom-Up Development in Haiti was published in 1981 and has been translated into both Spanish and Creole. He is currently focused on issues of U.S.-Haiti policy, politics, post-disaster development, and effective poverty alleviation.
Francois Pierre-Louis Jr. is associate professor of political science at Queens College, CUNY. His research interests include immigration, transnationalism, and Haitian and Caribbean politics. He served in the private cabinet of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and on the senior staff of Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis in 2007–2008. He is the author of Haitians in New York City: Transnationalism and Hometown Association. His articles have appeared in US Catholic, Wadabagei, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Education and Urban Society, and the Journal of Black Studies. He served as a senior advisor for the Haiti-CUNY Program to the chancellor of the City University of New York from 2011 to 2015.
Karen Richman is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of migration and religion. She is the author of Migration and Vodou and numerous articles and book chapters on Haitian and Mexican transnational societies. Her article “Innocent Imitations? Mimesis and Alterity in Haitian Vodou Art” won the Robert F. Heizer Award in 2009 for the best article in ethnohistory. She is the director of undergraduate studies in the Institute for Latino Studies, concurrent faculty in Anthropology and Romance Languages and Literatures, and a fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and of the Eck Institute for Global Health at University of Notre Dame.
Ricardo Seitenfus is the former special representative of the OAS in Haiti and is a professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil. He has written eleven books and numerous articles and chapters on international relations and Brazil in the international community. He holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Geneva. His most recent book is L’échec de l’aide internationale à Haïti: Dilemmes et égarements.
Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti; The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier; Martyrs’ Crossing; and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award. In 2014, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. Wilentz is a longtime contributing editor at The Nation and has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, and many other publications. She teaches in the literary journalism program at the University of California, Irvine.