DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Professor Doris Garraway passed away on October 4, 2025 at the age of 53. A stellar presence in the field of French and Francophone Caribbean studies, Doris gifted her colleagues and students with extraordinary grace and an unwavering commitment to the highest standards of both academic and interpersonal excellence. She served as Chair of the Department of French and Italian during the pandemic and it was her steady hand and passionate attachment to fairness that successfully led the department through the turmoil of those years. She was committed to investigating questions of discrimination and social justice and, during the same period, became the catalyst for collective discussions on the past and future of our country. She leaves a huge void but also a formidable legacy.

Doris’ research and teaching interests included Francophone Caribbean literature and historiography from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the Haitian Revolution, early modern French cultures, gender and slavery, postcolonial studies, law, and performance. Her celebrated books, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Duke UP, 2005; reprint 2008) and Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (co-edited, University of Virginia Press, 2008) have been highly influential in several related fields since their publication. At the time of her illness, she was completing a book manuscript entitled Liberty's Majesty: Print, Performance, and Theopolitical Sovereignty in the Haitian Kingdom of Henry Christophe.

Doris’ excellence was recognized with fellowships and awards from Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern's Kaplan Center for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center (declined), the John Carter Brown Library (declined), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (declined). She chaired the Department of French and Italian from 2019 to 2022, and she was named the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor at Northwestern for 2011 to 2014.

A generous and engaging speaker, Doris gave lectures at universities in the U.S. and abroad, including the University of Uppsala (Sweden), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Iowa, and Penn State University. She also gave keynote addresses at conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

A dedicated teacher and graduate advisor, Doris directed dissertations on various topics including gender in Haitian literature, anticolonialism and nationalism in far right-wing French literature and thought, trauma in twentieth-century Haitian literature, education in Francophone African and Caribbean literature, migration in Francophone Caribbean literature and film, and memory in North African literature. She served as Director of Graduate Studies in French from 2005 to 2011, and as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2013 to 2017.

The Department of French and Italian is organizing an international conference on Doris Garraway’s work and the field of French Caribbean studies. The conference will take place in early October 2026, on the first anniversary of Doris’ passing.

A memorial website was created in her honor.