Gaffield Wins Southern Historical Association Dissertation Prize

The Southern Historical Association Dissertation Prize Committee cited Gaffield's work in their award announcement as follows: "Starting with its 1804 Declaration of Independence, Julia Gaffield charts Haiti’s fraught early experiences in international affairs. While securing or failing to secure diplomatic relationships and establishing trade ties, Haiti confronted powerful beliefs about racial hierarchy and raised questions about national sovereignty. This impressive, richly-researched dissertation grapples with vital questions both conceptually and empirically. Gaffield charts the contours of Haiti’s sovereignty as both an abstract and a practical matter, asking how other countries framed the issue and how it took shape in practice. She also pursues a straightforward narrative of the republic’s interactions with other nations or colonies, especially the United States and the British and French empires. Her study is detailed, precise, and painstaking in its documentation of these relationships. One of the most interesting lessons of the dissertation lies in its demonstration that ideological stances on national sovereignty sometimes conflicted with on-the-ground trade practice. Gaffield shows the complications diplomats, military men, and merchants faced in reconciling competing imperatives of economics, diplomacy, and ideology. Gaffield casts a dauntingly wide net, researching across linguistic and imperial or national boundaries. Her capable mining of sources like admiralty court records yields treasures in unexpected places. We applaud this dissertation’s polish and ambition and anticipate it having a powerful impact as a book