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, "Empire of Debt: Haiti and France in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World," 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. I use manuscript, published, and material sources from public and private archives and libraries in seven countries in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean to tell the story of how the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, as it came to be known, became entangled in sprawling systems of international indebtedness and foreign loans. My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council's Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy, a Lapidus Center Fellowship from the Schomburg Center, an Interamericas Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library, a Gustave Gimon Fellowship from Stanford University, a short-term fellowship from the Huntington Library, and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Economic History Association, among other sources. I am currently a dissertation fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a recipient of the Charlotte W. Newcombe fellowship. 

Insofar as my work is broadly engaged with global conversations on representation and repatriation, I am also interested in curatorial and artistic practices that link the economic histories of slavery and emancipation to the visual cultures of modernity. 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