Richard Lee Turits

Bio

Richard Turits is a Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Latin American Studies at Willliam & Mary. A graduate of Brown University, he received an M.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on histories of race, slavery, nondemocratic regimes, state violence, and U.S. empire in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially the Hispanic Caribbean and Haiti. Professor Turits’s books include Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford, 2003), awarded the American Historical Association’s Fagg and Bolton-Johnson prizes; Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean with Laurent Dubois (UNC, 2019), a Choice Outstanding Title; Terreurs de frontières: Le massacre des Haïtiens en République Dominicaine en 1937 with Lauren Derby (Centre Challenges, 2021), awarded a LASA Translation Prize; and Enslaved New World: Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Race in Santo Domingo (Cambridge, 2026). He also authored “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” winner of the AHA Robertson Memorial Prize. The article also has been translated and published in Spanish, French and Haitian Kreyòl.  Turits has received fellowships from the ACLS, the Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays programs, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, and the Social Science Research Council. In 2014, he was named a Foreign Corresponding Member of the Dominican Academy of History. Prior to joining the faculty at William & Mary, Turits taught in the Department of History at Princeton University and the Departments of History and of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, where he also directed the university’s Title VI Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (2007-2012). Turits teaches courses on the Caribbean, U.S. overseas interventions, race and racism in the Americas, and the Cuban Revolution, among other topics.