Richard Lee Turits

Bio

Richard Turits is a historian of the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly the Hispanic Caribbean and Haiti.  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 have focused on histories of race, slavery, nondemocratic regimes, state violence, and U.S. empire. Professor Turits’s books include Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford, 2003), awarded the AHA 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,” winner of the AHA Robertson Memorial Prize. The article been translated and published in Spanish, French and Haitian Kreyòl. Professor 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, Professor Turits taught in the Departments of History and of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, where he also directed the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (2007-2012), and in the Department of History at Princeton University. He teaches courses on the Caribbean, U.S. overseas interventions, race and racism, and the Cuban Revolution.