Julia Gaffield, Associate Professor of History at William & Mary and holder of a Ph.D. in History from Duke University, is recognized as a leading scholar in research and publications on the Haitian Revolution. Her latest work, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom, is a biography of Haiti’s founding father, published by Yale University Press in June 2025.

Her first book, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015 and received the 2016 Mary Alice and Frederick Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. The work received glowing reviews in fifteen academic journals, including The American Historical Review and The William and Mary Quarterly.