Jean Casimir

Retired Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences, The University of Haiti

Bio

Pr. Jean Casimir is a leading scholar of Haitian history and culture. He was a Visiting Professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, Los Angeles, California in 1998; Visiting Professor at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica in 1999; Visiting Mellon Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Duke University, in 2010. Since 2004, he teaches at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the University of Haiti, courses on culture and society of Haiti and the Caribbean. From 2013, he participates in the Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School, organized by the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and Duke University, the United States of America. He received his formal doctoral training in Sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has held research and teaching positions in the Congo, Brazil, and Mexico.

He has also served as a international civil servant with the United Nations, including among others United Nations Social Affairs Officer and a position with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, all the while continuing his academic studies on Haiti.

More recently, he served as Haiti’s Ambassador to the United States and as Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States (1991-1996). In 2023, his book The Haitians: A Decolonial History, received the Fanon Outstanding Book Award, as part of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.