Rate My Professor Lauren Derby

Derby's acclaimed book The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Duke University Press, 2009) won the Lewis Hanke Prize, the Sybil and Philip Freedman Prize from the Latin American Studies Association, the Schultz Prize from the American Historical Association, the Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Council on Latin American History, and co-won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association. Her forthcoming monograph Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2025) draws on oral testimonies of demonic animal apparitions. She co-edited The Dominican Republic Reader (Duke, 2014), Activating the Past: Historical Memory in the Black Atlantic (Cambridge Scholars, 2010), and Terreurs de frontière: le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937 (2021), the latter earning the 2023 LASA Haiti and Dominican Republic Section Prize for best translation. Key articles include “Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900 to 1937” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1994; Conference on Latin American History Award winner), “Imperial Idols: French and U.S. Revenants in Haitian Vodou” (History of Religions, 2015), and “Beyond Fugitive Speech: Rumor and Affect in Caribbean History” (Small Axe, 2014). Derby has received the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2010-2011), National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and other fellowships including Charlotte W. Newcombe and Fulbright-Hays. Her work has profoundly influenced Caribbean historiography, with major publications garnering hundreds of citations.