Rate My Professor John Garrigus

John Garrigus is a distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he joined the History faculty in 2006 as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2016. Previously, he advanced from assistant professor in 1988 to full professor by 2006 at Jacksonville University and served as a Visiting Fulbright Professor of History at the École Normale Supérieure and Faculté d’Ethnologie, State University of Haiti, from January to June 1999. Garrigus holds a Ph.D. in History (1988) and an M.A. in History (1985) from The Johns Hopkins University, as well as a B.A. summa cum laude in History (1983) from DePauw University. His research specializations encompass Atlantic history, Caribbean studies, the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, French imperialism, early modern France, Haiti, slavery, race, and historical GIS, with a particular focus on the social dynamics of free people of color, citizenship, and slave resistance in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue.

Garrigus has made significant contributions to the field through key publications, including A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance before the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2023), which argues that reported slave poisonings were actually caused by livestock diseases like anthrax; Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize by the Society for French Historical Studies; The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, co-authored with Trevor Burnard (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, co-edited with Laurent Dubois (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2006, second edition 2016). His extensive body of peer-reviewed articles appears in journals such as The Americas, Slavery & Abolition, and William & Mary Quarterly, with over 1,600 citations on Google Scholar. Among his major awards and fellowships are the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2019-2021), Hurford Family Fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2017-2018), Tibesar Prize from the Conference on Latin American History (1994), and several teaching honors including the Alicia Smotherman Award for Innovative Teaching (2009). His scholarship has reshaped understandings of the precursors to the Haitian Revolution, earning accolades such as selection of his 2023 book as one of the best scholarly works by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Times Literary Supplement.