“My introduction to the history of slavery was through reggae music. It was Jamaican artists such as Bob Marley and Peter Tosh who drew me to a larger world of black history.”
A historian focused on the African Diaspora, and a documentary film producer
Biography
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavours are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world.
Brown is Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013).
Brown was Producer and Director of Research for the award-wining television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009).
His first book, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award. His most recent book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), was awarded eight prizes—including the Anisfield-Wolf Award for non-fiction, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Harriet Tubman Prize.