Julia Gaffield received her PhD from the Department of History at Duke University in 2012. She was at Duke as a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar and a doctoral fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her dissertation studies the early independence period in Haiti and seeks to understand the diverse relationships that state leaders in Haiti held with the international community. This research builds on her previous work on state-formation and nationalism in Haiti, published in the Journal of Social History in 2007 as “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807.” In April 2010 she received international media attention for her archival discovery of the only known extant government-issued copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. This document is part of a larger story of international communication and negotiation in the early years of Haiti’s independence.