Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Michel-Rolph Trouillot died on July 5, 2012. He was one of the most outstanding Haitian scholars and a widely recognized scholar on the uses and abuses of power. He wrote with great depth and understanding about Haiti.

He was the author and co-author of a number of other books, including Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (2003), Open the Social Sciences (1996), Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (1990) and Peasants and Capital; Dominica in the World Economy (1988). The Caribbean Philosophical Association awarded him the 2011 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award “for the originality of his interrogations in the human sciences, especially anthropology and history, and his articulation of the importance and challenges of Haiti in contemporary discussions of freedom and reclamations of the past.”

Born in Haiti, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the City University of New York and his PhD from Johns Hopkins. He was Krieger/Eisenhower Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and director of the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of Chicago in 1998.

His approach to the uses and abuses of power in Haiti and elsewhere opened new research avenues for scholars that followed.