Vincent Brown

Vincent Brown is an American historian and professor at Harvard University, where he holds the Charles Warren Professorship in American History. Born in the 1960s, he received his degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Duke University. He has written widely on the history of slavery, the Caribbean, and Atlantic history. Brown's book Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020) is an account of the large-scale slave rebellion led by Tacky in Jamaica in 1760—one of the most significant slave uprisings in the history of the British empire—and places it in the context of broader Atlantic wars and the geopolitics of the mid-eighteenth century Caribbean. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2021, the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, and was widely praised for its innovative use of maps and cartography alongside historical narrative. Brown is also the producer of an award-winning documentary on the slave trade. He is one of the leading scholars of Atlantic slavery and its history.