Lauren Derby

Lauren Derby is Professor of History and Dr. E. Bradford Burns Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1997 with distinction and her B.A. with honors in Development Studies from Brown University in 1983. Derby's research specializes in modern Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly the French and Spanish Caribbean regions encompassing the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Her scholarship examines everyday life under regimes of state terror, the long durée social history of the Haitian-Dominican borderlands, and popular articulations of race, national identity, and witchcraft through media such as rumor, food, and animals. She has conducted extensive fieldwork, including over sixty hours of oral history interviews on policymaking, planning, and daily life under the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic from 1992-1993, supported by collaborative Fulbright grants.

Derby's acclaimed book The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Duke University Press, 2009) won the Lewis Hanke Prize, the Sybil and Philip Freedman Prize from the Latin American Studies Association, the Schultz Prize from the American Historical Association, the Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Council on Latin American History, and co-won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association. Her forthcoming monograph Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2025) draws on oral testimonies of demonic animal apparitions. She co-edited The Dominican Republic Reader (Duke, 2014), Activating the Past: Historical Memory in the Black Atlantic (Cambridge Scholars, 2010), and Terreurs de frontière: le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937 (2021), the latter earning the 2023 LASA Haiti and Dominican Republic Section Prize for best translation. Key articles include “Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900 to 1937” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1994; Conference on Latin American History Award winner), “Imperial Idols: French and U.S. Revenants in Haitian Vodou” (History of Religions, 2015), and “Beyond Fugitive Speech: Rumor and Affect in Caribbean History” (Small Axe, 2014). Derby has received the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2010-2011), National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and other fellowships including Charlotte W. Newcombe and Fulbright-Hays. Her work has profoundly influenced Caribbean historiography, with major publications garnering hundreds of citations.

Professional Email: derby@history.ucla.edu