Arielle Xena Alterwaite

I am a Ph.D. candidate who studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world with a focus on France and its empire. In Spring 2021, I completed my General Examinations in "European History, 1650-1914," "Modern Intellectual History," "Race, Slavery, and Abolition," and "Legacies of the Haitian Revolution." I am broadly interested in histories of political economy, capitalism, national sovereignty, abolition, reparations, and imperialism.

My dissertation addresses the specific case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, where I explore Haiti's sovereign debt in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and argue for the international significance of the debt for finance, monetary systems, nation-making, and political thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. My research is supported by the Social Science Research Council's Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy, a Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center, an Interamericas Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, a Gustave Gimon Fellowship at Stanford University Libraries, a short-term fellowship at the Huntington Library, and the Economic History Association, among other sources. 

My writing about art and history has been published in The American Historical Review, Slavery & Abolition and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Prospective students, please contact me if you have questions about studying at Penn!

Advisor: Sophia Rosenfeld

Committee Members: Warren Breckman, Kathleen Brown, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Marc Flandreau