A Day in Colonial Haiti Presented by Philippe Girard

Live storytelling by McNeese State University students will make the past “come alive” as they portray real people in 18th century Haiti as documented through a 2024 book written by Dr. Philippe Girard, McNeese associate professor of history, for a free McNeese Banners event Tuesday, March 25. 

A Day in Colonial Haiti in the Age of Runaways, Revolutionaries and Executioners, which will be held at 6 p.m. in Stokes Auditorium in Hardtner Hall, will introduce the audience to several inhabitants, rich and poor, in the French colony of Haiti as they go about their daily lives on Easter Sunday 1784. 

“Banners has done academic talks in the past (including by me), but I wanted to do something different—not just the usual academic lecture but something more engaging,” according to Girard. 

“The book is meant for a general audience. I selected 24 people I encountered in the archives while doing my research and imagined what an hour of their day would be like in 1784,” he said.   

“The idea was to make the past ‘come alive’ with 24 short stories on the daily life of an executioner, a slave, a governor, a journalist, a priest, a pirate, a hunter, etc. With this in mind, I thought the talk could involve some images, sounds and live readings by McNeese students of two to three selected chapters,” he added. 

Girard selected four students to record all the chapters for the audiobook – Jaspin Vaughn, Kerry Wilson, Juliet Riviere and Oluseun Olagbaju – and two to three of these students will do the live readings of selected characters – the opera diva Mrs. Marsan, the hunter Milscent and the old pirate. 

Girard, a native of Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, specializes in the history of the Caribbean during the Haitian Revolution and is the author of six books on Haitian history. He  

received degrees from the Paris Institute of Political Science in France and Ohio University and was a research fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University. 

For more information on this year’s Banners lineup, various levels of membership available or ticket prices for some of the events, check out the Banners website at www.banners.org or call the Banners office at 337-475-5123. Tickets to Banners events are also available at the door and McNeese and Sowela students are admitted free with valid student IDs.  

Persons requesting accommodations in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) should contact the Office of Campus Compliance and Civility at least 72 hours before the event. Additional information is available from the Office of Campus Compliance and Civility, located in the Burton Business Center, Suite 407, by phone at 337-475-5428, by fax at 337-475-5603, or by email at compliance@mcneese.edu.