HWS News
3 April 2025 Exploring History: Sabine Cadeau on the Haitian Massacre of 1937
The annual Huff Lecture Series sponsored by the HWS History Department will welcome McGill University Professor Sabine Cadeau on Thursday, April 10.
Sabine Cadeau, an historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean who serves as Professor of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, will offer an address “Rethinking the 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic” on Thursday, April 10 at 6 p.m. in the Geneva Room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library. The talk is hosted by the HWS History Department as this year’s Huff Lecture; it is free and open to the public.
Cadeau is the author of several works, including More than Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which “traces a successively worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under the American occupiers, accelerated in 1930, with the rise of Trujillo, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of an estimated twenty thousand civilians.” The book earned the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide in 2023.
Her lecture will explore the 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic, incorporating new archival evidence and oral histories from the massacre’s last surviving victims. One of the largest instances of racial violence in 20th-century America, the massacre saw an estimated 20,000 ethnic Haitians killed along the Dominican border under orders from dictator Rafael Trujillo.
The annual Huff Lecture Series honors Robert A. Huff, who served as professor of history at HWS from 1962 to 1992. A dedicated educator, Huff left a profound and lasting impact on hundreds of students who passed through his classroom over three decades. He was the first holder of the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship in the Humanities and the Social Science (1981-86) and was recognized with the Faculty Community Service Prize (1988).
