I’m Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington.

In September 2023, Harvard University Press published my book “A Secret Among the Blacks”:  Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution.  

The Chronicle of Higher Education named A Secret among the Blacks one of the “Best Scholarly Books of 2023,” and the Times Literary Supplement named it as one of the “TLS Books of the Year 2023.” Here’s a list of the scholarly reviews so far.

The book charts three decades of resistance and environmental turmoil in the region where the Haitian Revolution began. It provides a new interpretation of the so-called Makandal poison plot of 1757-58. New archival discoveries show how the world’s only successful slave revolution grew out of people’s attempts to survive zoonotic disease, oppression, and malicious prosecutions. An Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2019-21) and a year at the National Humanities Center (2017-18) allowed me to write most of this work.

Click here for my description of the book’s key findings in an on-line seminar organized by the University of Hull.  I talked about the book with Patrick Jean-Baptiste on his Nèg Mawon podcast and with Brigid Wallace on the New Books Network.

You can see some of the book’s underlying research in my William & Mary Quarterly article about the devastating impact of livestock disease on enslaved people in Saint-Domingue’s North Province. It appeared in the October 2021 issue.

UTA Research Profile; Google Scholar Profile

Contact me at:
Department of History
Box 19529
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington TX 76019-0529
UTA History Office: (817) 272-2861
Garrigus@uta.edu