AHRC Catalyst Award for Dr Nicole Willson for “Building a Black Nation: Haitian Dynasties of the (Long) Nineteenth Century”
IBAR is delighted to announce that IBAR Research Fellow Dr Nicole Willson has been awarded a major AHRC Catalyst award for her project “Building a Black Nation: Haitian Dynasties of the (Long) Nineteenth Century”. An integrated public heritage, engaged research and digital humanities project, BABN aims to reassemble dispersed and displaced stories (embedded in texts, images and objects) related to diverse visions of early Haitian sovereignty. The project coincides with the 220th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ 1805 imperial constitution – unprecedented for institutionalising Blackness as the foundation of Haitian citizenship – which followed Haiti’s rapid transition from independent statehood after the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803) to elective monarchy in 1804. Most significantly, 2025 marks the bicentenary of the indemnity agreement thrust upon Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer by France: an event that signalled both the diplomatic making of Haiti as an internationally recognised sovereign state, and its financial ruin, creating generational ripples that extend into the present.
It brings together vast international heritage partners in the UK, Italy, the US and, most importantly, Haiti in celebrating stories of Haitian sovereignty and interrogating stories of colonial implication through four exhibitions that will take place between 2026 and 2028. Most excitingly, the project will feature a series of historically informed reconstructions of dresses originally produced in London for Queen Marie-Louise Christophe and her daughters in 1815! The dresses will be workshopped in collaboration with dyaspora creatives and African Atlantic fashion scholars and will travel to each exhibition site.
Nicole is excited to be collaborating on the project with M. Stephanie Chancy, Ph.D. at the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), along with curators at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, the Eccles Institute, the Museo Enrico Caffi, George A Smathers Libraries and the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien. She acknowledges the support of other colleagues in this success, including M. Stephanie Chancy and Miriam Franchina, Dawn Dublin (founder of Black Butterfly) and her UCLan colleagues Alan Rice, Raphael Hoermann and Yvonne Reddick (among others). She also thanks the project’s other supporters, donors and champions including, but not limited to, Denis O’Brien, Joseph Guerdy Lissade, Isabelle Dupuy, Lord Leslie Griffiths, Guilaine Brutus MSc and the Haitian Heritage Group, Wilford Marous, MBA, Michelet Romulus – MRICS, Monette Etienne and the British Association for American Studies.
