Vincent Brown, a professor of African and African American studies and American history at Harvard University, will share the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. The prize is awarded each year to the “best book(s) written in English about slavery, abolition and their legacies across all borders and all time.”
Professor Brown is being honored for Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020). The book is about the largest slave insurrection in the 18th century British empire in Jamaica from 1760 to 1761. “People think of slave revolts as something separate from war so I wanted to show how the slave revolt was in fact a war,” Dr. Brown said. “Slavery itself was a constant state of war.”
Dr. Brown’s book has won eight book prizes and was a finalist for five others. He first joined the faculty at Harvard in 2003. After teaching at Duke University from 2010 t0 2012, he rejoined the faculty at Harvard. Dr. Brown is a graduate of the Univerity of California, San Diego, where he majored in history. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University.
Dr. Brown will be honored at a ceremony sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City on February 17, 2022.
