Claire Antone Payton

Claire Antone Payton is a scholar of the Caribbean specializing in urban history, memory, and natural disaster. She received her Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 2018 and a Masters in History and French Studies from New York University in 2012.

In 2010, she created the Haiti Memory Project, an oral history initiative that documented first person testimonies of the deadly Port-au-Prince earthquake and life in its aftermath.

Her scholarship has appeared in Oral History Review, the Journal of Urban History, NACLA Report on the Americas, Archipelagos, and several edited volumes. She has a book contract for my manuscript with University of California Press.

Her research has enjoyed the support of a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship at the Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at UVA, and Kluge fellowship at the Library of Congress.

Currently, she is the Manager of the Memory Project at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, where she promotes democratic values and racial equity through public-facing programs that shape inclusive historical memory.