About

Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is a multi-media historian and the Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative activities focus on African and African American history, with an emphasis on innovative approaches to historical storytelling and analysis.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Philosophy
• Ancient history
• Anthropology
• Media studies
• Communication
• Psychology
• Religious studies
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Slavery and Empire-Making: Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt

  Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Slavery and Empire-Making:Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt Antoinette Burton, Kathleen Wilson, Matthew J. Smith, Daniel Domingues da Silva, James Sidbury, and Vincent Brown Introduction to the Book Forum Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Histories of slavery tend to be unevenly distributed in studies of anglophone empire. Imperialism is typically an explanatory force in histories of enslavement: acknowledged as a conditional context in accounts about its reach and significance and typically interwoven in and through its foundational narratives. Conversely, histories of empire, especially those that operate at scale, rarely take slavery fully into account, if at all—as the most recent blockbuster in the field, Caroline Elkins' 2022 Legacies of Violence, powerfully testifies.1 That is to say, it's relatively uncommon for scholars of modern empire to start with slavery and track its longitudinal effects on British imperial histories beyond abolition—save perhaps where the afterlives of antislavery movements and ideology or the material reality of indenture is concerned. With few exceptions, work that actively narrates either the episodic or recurrent connections between enslavement as a violent, extractive practice of racializing capitalism and the emergence of British imperial power as a globalizing project is not the norm in contemporary scholarship.2 The same is true for studies which center the role that enslaved peoples have had in shaping what British "slave-empire" configurations looked like by going beyond the confines of the established archive. With the publication of Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt, the impossibility of segmenting slavery from empire-making in imperial history is directly challenged. As is the notion that the archive places insurmountable limits on imagining the consequential part enslaved men and women played in directing how the interdependence of these histories and their contribution to colonial world-making on a global stage should be told. The book lays down a set of interpretive gauntlets that historians of empire eager for a re-mix of historiographies of slavery and imperialism will welcome. Key to the recalibration the book calls for, is an argument about the urgency of making the frame of war and rebellion—indeed, of historicizing rebellion as war—constitutive of our apprehension of the eighteenth century Atlantic world. Brown calls this "the martial geography of Atlantic slavery" (2), a description that reminds us that rebellions against enslavement were militant responses to its atrocities, and that such militance compels us to re-suture the Caribbean and West Africa anew. This, in order to fully appreciate "the hemispheric reach" of slave revolts. It is well-known that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean was the focus of a deliberate British imperial strategy. But through a vigorous rereading of a wide variety of historiographical work in both slavery and empire history and studies (and beyond) Brown materially links, for example, the Jamaican slave uprising of 1760-61 to histories of war and conflict on the African continent—conflicts between and among indigenous communities (as well as in opposition to slavers) which had a bearing on the way that rebellion unfolded in the recesses of St Mary Parish. Seeing slave rebellion as a species of military campaign underscores how "war and slavery nourished each other as the histories of Europe, Africa, and America became increasingly intertwined," thereby revealing Tacky's revolt and others to be protagonists in the making of the transoceanic history of slavery, to be sure, but of empire as well. Readers will not want to miss the "animated thematic map" of slave revolt that accompanies Brown's book, not least because it dramatizes in visual terms the combination of geographical re-integration and spatial re-orientation that his study offers to those who may be familiar with Caribbean rebellions or Atlantic world slavery but may not fully grasp their interconnectivity.3 Meanwhile, critical to his project as a whole is Brown's investment in reconstructing histories of key rebels—rebels whose specific identities are elusive but whose composite profiles Brown is especially skillful in building out. The book opens with the story of Wager, whose African name was Apongo and who was a major player in Jamaica in 1760-61. There is a lot we can know...

  PublisherDOI

• Spiritual Terror

  2021-04-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Spiritual Terror

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Spiritual Terror

  2021-04-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tacky's Revolt The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

  2020-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Tacky's revolt, in modern-day Jamaica, was the largest slave uprising in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. A strikingly modern guerilla conflict, the revolt inspired both fear of and sympathy toward black lives. Vincent Brown offers a gripping account of the fighting and its reverberations across an interconnected world

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword: Militant Territoriality

  Journal of Transnational American Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology

  Afterword for the Special Forum on American Territorialities

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tacky’s Revolt

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2019-01-01 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Tacky’s revolt, in modern-day Jamaica, was the largest slave uprising in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. A strikingly modern guerilla conflict, the revolt inspired both fear of and sympathy toward black lives. Vincent Brown offers a gripping account of the fighting and its reverberations across an interconnected world.

  PublisherDOI

• Developing Listening and Speaking Skills through Literature Circles

  Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2019-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As English-teaching faculty within a Japanese university, we as teachers are responsible for nurturing many aspects of our students' emerging competence in English as a second/foreign language (L2).Some of these aspects are taught in classes which focus on, for example, English grammar and syntax, the segmental pronunciation of short vowels, or the Greek & Latin word-roots of certain

  PublisherOA PDF

• 1. War’s Empire

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Students’ perceptions of reading response journals and MReader quizzes

  Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2019-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The reading response notebook has been regarded as an effective means of involving students in genuine reading and writing activities. I have implemented an extensive-reading response notebook in my reading-skills courses. This paper presents the rationale behind the use of this notebook in language learning and the procedures of my instruction. Students’ perceptions of their extensive reading and notebook-writing experiences are examined. Findings obtained from a small research study indicate that students give broad support to writing their responses in a dedicated notebook when reading fiction, and perceive the approach as a positive means of developing reading and writing skills.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Sean Grahan

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  25 shared

• Marc A. McPherson

  Monsanto (United States)

  25 shared

• Jeffery M. Saarela

  Canadian Museum of Nature

  25 shared

• Mark W. Chase

  University of Vienna

  25 shared

• Winson Young

  25 shared

• Heath O’Brien

  25 shared

• Richard G. Olmstead

  University of California, Los Angeles

  25 shared

• Jessie Zgurski

  University of Alberta

  25 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  Duke University

• B.A.

  University of California, San Diego

Awards & honors

• 2009 John E. O’Connor Film Award of the American Historical…
• Best Documentary at the 2009 Hollywood Black Film Festival
• Best Documentary at the 2009 Martha’s Vineyard African-Ameri…
• 2009 Merle Curti Award (co-winner)
• 2009 James A. Rawley Prize