Megan Emery is a PhD student in Transregional History at Georgetown University. Megan's research focuses on the French Atlantic during and after the Haitian Revolution.
"'Unfortunate Exiles': A Digital Archive of Refugees During the Saint-Domingue Diaspora" narrates broad outlines for two decades of diasporic movement from 1793-1811. The collection consists of newspaper articles, a passport, baptismal records, a congressional act, and a memoir (& a response to it) which all reference refugee routes to (and through) New Orleans, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cuba, Kingston, and France. By displaying these seemingly disparate sources in chronological order, a timeline surfaces that parallels events transpiring in the greater Atlantic World. Commonalities appear across documents originating from different places. With only eleven documents and a supplemental map, "Unfortunate Exiles" begins to reconstruct shared diasporic experience across space and time.