Vincent Brown

Vincent Brown joins the FAS as David Brion Davis Professor of History. Brown is a historian of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. A native of Southern California, he was educated at the University of California, San Diego, and received his PhD in History and Graduate Certificate in African & African American Studies from Duke University, where he also trained in the theory and craft of film and video making. He is a co-founder of Timestamp Media, which explores the history that connects people and places across the world.

Prior to joining Yale, Brown was the Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African American Studies, and affiliate of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Brown has published two prize-winning books about the history of slavery, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), as well as numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals. He was producer and director of research for the award-winning television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), he is the executive producer and host for The Bigger Picture (2022), producer and director of How Do You Remember the Days of Slavery? (2023), executive producer for American Muslims (2025), and producer of Profiles in the Memory of Slavery (2026).

He is currently writing two books, Soul Survival: Slavery and Creation in the African Diaspora (Pantheon/Penguin Allen Lane/Zahar Companhia das Letras) and Profiles in the Memory of Slavery (Princeton University Press).