Fellowship / Fellows

Vincent Brown

  • 2005–2006
  • History
  • Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Vincent Brown
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Vincent Brown is a historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. He teaches early American history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas at Harvard University.Brown is currently writing Specter in the Canes: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, to be published by Harvard University Press. The book shows how people in Jamaican slave society and its transatlantic environs strove to achieve their political ambitions and communal desires through the cultural practices that related the living to the dead. Brown is the author of "Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority: Supernatural Power in Jamaican Slave Society," in New Studies in the History of American Slavery (University of Georgia Press, 2005).

Brown received his PhD in history from Duke University in 2002 and is the recipient of the Charles Warren Center Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard University (2002–2003), the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Dissertation Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania (2001–2002), and the John Hope Franklin Distinguished Teacher Fellowship, Duke University (2000).

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