Malick W. Ghachem is a historian and lawyer. His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He also writes and speaks on issues of academic freedom, free expression, and diversity. He is the author of The Company and the Colony: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble (Princeton University Press, 2025) and The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012), also published in French translation. He teaches courses on Libertarianism, the Age of Revolution, Slavery and Abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics.
Professor Ghachem earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and his doctorate in history from Stanford. He clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami, FL in 2004. A member of the Massachusetts bar, Professor Ghachem practiced law in Boston from 2005 to 2010 for two law firms: Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. For part of that period (2006-2007) he served as a lecturer in MIT’s Political Science Department. Between 2010 and 2013, he taught at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, ME. He is an active member of the bars of Massachusetts and New York.
He has published a wide range of articles in the fields of French colonial and American legal history, among them “The Antislavery Script: Haiti’s Place in the Narrative of Atlantic Revolution,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith M. Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 148-167; “The Colonial Vendée,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 156-176; and “From Emergency Law to Legal Process: Herbert Wechsler and the Second World War,” co-authored with Daniel Gordon, 40 Suffolk University Law Review 333 (2007). Ghachem is the editor of “Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 29, no. 1 (2003). He is at work on two new projects. The first is a book under contract with Yale University Press entitled “The Conversion of the Jesuits: Slavery, Totalitarianism, and the Catholic Church in Haiti.” The second is a study of institutional neutrality, student protest, and academic freedom from the 1960s to the present (previewed here)