Noted scholar, historian, and filmmaker Dr. Vincent Brown will deliver the inaugural Dr. Genna Rae McNeil Endowed Black History Month lecture.
With the support of generous donations from the UNC community, the annual University-wide Black History Month Lecture is now endowed and will welcome its first guest lecturer during Black History Month in February 2023.
Professor Brown is currently the Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African American Studies, and Interim Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
Vincent Brown, Harvard University
He will join us to present the first Dr. Genna Rae McNeil Black History Month Lecture. He is also founding director of Harvard’s History Design Studio and teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas.
Brown is a prolific scholar and filmmaker and is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008), producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens and is most recently the author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020).
Awards for Tacky’s Revolt include the 2021 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; the 2021 P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora; the 2021 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians; the 2021 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize from the Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the 2021 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the 2020 Sons & Daughters of United States Middle Passage Phillis Wheatley Book Award for Non-Fiction Research; and Co-winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Guardian and The Observer and was selected as one of the Best Black History Books of 2020 by the editors of the African American Intellectual History Society.
Brown co-founded Timestamp Media in 2020. He is the Executive Producer of the seven-part WNET/Timestamp Media series The Bigger Picture (2020–22) and has served as an advisor and commentator on numerous projects. His work, including producing and directing, covers more than 20 major media projects over the past 15 years. His most recent work includes Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery (Executive Producer).
Brown is a Ph.D. graduate in history from Duke University. He also earned a BA in history from the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Brown’s lecture is free and open to the public. Several of his books will be available for purchase onsite.
For information, contact: Sheriff Drammeh at 919-962-9001 or email sheriff7@email.unc.edu.