Anne Eller

Associate Professor

Office:

HQ 244

Phone:

203-432-4585

Fields of interest:

Latin America and the Caribbean, Emancipation, Haitian and Dominican studies; African Diaspora; Independence and Decolonization

Bio:

Anne Eller is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history. She received her degree in the history of the African Diaspora and Latin America from NYU; her dissertation received the Dean’s prize for outstanding dissertation in the humanities, 2011-2012. She is a former Fulbright-Hays scholar and her work has been supported by multiple research and writing fellowships.

Eller’s first book, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom, focuses on the reoccupation of the Dominican Republic by Spain in 1861 as well as the popular anti-colonial movement that followed. In the book, Eller deepens study of the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world and breaks from paradigms that emphasize perpetual conflict between Haitians and Dominicans in the nineteenth century. She contextualizes the small body of writing of Dominican elites with new analyses of inclusive and popular histories of identity, community, and freedom, summoning sources that range from trial records and consul reports to fragments of poetry and song. Rethinking Dominican relationships with their communities, the national project, and the greater Caribbean, Eller shows how popular anticolonial resistance, as well as Caribbean anti-slavery movements across multiple islands and coasts, were anchored in a rich and complex political culture that traveled beyond individual shores. The narrative traces the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865 in the context of emancipation struggles throughout the Americas. Her book won Honorable Mention in both the Isis Duarte Book Prize of the Latin American Studies Association and the Avant Garde Book Prize of the Haitian Studies Association in 2017. We Dream won the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly publication at Yale in 2018.

Currently, Eller’s research explores the political struggles over emancipation and popular politics in greater Caribbean and hemispheric context during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Her work has been published in the The American Historical Review, Small Axe, and other fora. She has participated in colloquia at venues like the Dominican National Archives and Philadelphia’s Taller Puertorriqueño and in the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s online exhibit “Haiti: An Island Luminous.”

At Yale, she teaches courses in colonial and modern Latin American and Caribbean history, Caribbean political thought, imperialism, Atlantic history, and the African Diaspora.

Selected publications

“Into the Hills: Challenges of Writing Post-Emancipation Agency in the Caribbean.” Journal of Social History 57:3(Spring 2024), 404-410.

“‘A fossilized utopia’?: Debates over Foreign Landownership and Development in Haiti, 1830s-1870s.” Journal of Haitian Studies 28:1(2022), 4-38.

With Claire Payton and Lewis Clorméus. “Many Lifetimes of Knowledge: The History of the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l’Instruction Chrétienne’s Newspaper Collection and its Digital Future.” SX archipelagos, May 2022.

“From Cotton to Camels: Plantation Dreams in Mid-Century Hispaniola.” In Dale Tomich, ed. Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021).

Soñemos juntos: La independencia dominicana, Haití y la lucha por la libertad en el Caribe. Astrid Valenzuela and Isabel Amarante, trans. Prólogo por Sophie Maríñez. Santo Domingo: Editorial Universitaria Bonó, 2021.

“Skirts Rolled Up: The Gendered Terrain of Political Protest in Nineteenth-Century Port-au-Prince.” Small Axe 25: 1 (64)(March 2021), 61–83.

“Raining Blood: Spiritual Power, Gendered Violence, and Anticolonial Lives in the Nineteenth-Century Dominican Borderlands.” Hispanic American Historical Review 99:3(August 2019), 431-465.

“Beyond a Revolution: The Common Wind at a Nadir.” In H-Net Haiti’s Forum on the Common Wind: In Honor of Julius S. Scott. Julia Gaffield and Marlene L. Daut, eds.

“Rumors of Slavery: Defending Emancipation in a Hostile Caribbean.” American Historical Review, 122:3 (June 2017), 653-679.

Winner of the 2018 Andrés Ramos Mattei—Neville Hall Article Prize, Association of Caribbean Historians

Winner of the 2018 Joseph T. Criscenti Best Article Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies

We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Duke University Press (Dec. 2016).

“How History Has Been Distorted to Justify the Dominican Deportations.” Africa is a Country (July 2015).

“Las Ramas del Árbol de la Libertad: La Guerra de la Restauración en la República Dominicana y Haití.” Caribbean Studies 43:1 (Jan.-June 2015), 113-144.

“’Awful Pirates’ and ‘Hordes of Jackals’: Santo Domingo/The Dominican Republic in Nineteenth-Century Historiography.” Small Axe 18:44 (July 2014), 80-94.

“The tree that says ‘yes’: Césaire’s Nature and Revolutionary Universalism.” For Columbia University’s The Work of the Man Has Only Just Begun: Legacies of Césaire.

“‘All would be equal in the effort’: Santo Domingo’s ‘Italian Revolution,’ Independence, and Haiti, 1809-1822.” Journal of Early American History 1:2 (2011), 105-141.