Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Founding Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. A native of Southern California, he was educated at the University of California, San Diego, and received his PhD in History from Duke University, where he also trained in the theory and craft of film and video making.  

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). The author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is also Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), and he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-winning television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens. 

In 2021 Brown co-founded Timestamp Media, where he has served as Executive Producer, Writer, and Host for The Bigger Picture (2022), co-produced with WNET for PBS Digital Studios; Executive Producer and Writer for Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery (2022), co-produced with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Executive Producer, Writer, and Host for How Do You Remember the Days of Slavery? (2023); and Executive Producer for American Muslims: A History Revealed (2024). He will teach History Design Studio in Fall 2024.