Photo by Lolita Parker Jr.

Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow

“The Radcliffe fellowship was fundamental to my career. I finished most of the first draft of my book, which has now won three prizes and helped earn me tenure. I couldn’t have done this without the year at the Institute.

“What Radcliffe provided me was time and space to do the book my way. I could put in the creative time to make it the book I wanted it to be. It didn’t have to be a rush job. I also was able to use the time and contacts there to work on my
documentary film.”

Vincent Brown, a professor of history and of African American studies at Harvard University, is a multimedia historian. During his Radcliffe fellowship, he worked on his book The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008), for which he received two prizes from the Organization of American Historians. The committee for the organization’s James A. Rawley Prize called the book “an analytically sophisticated, intellectually creative and artfully written study of early Jamaica that enriches our understanding of life within Atlantic slavery.” The book also received the Louis Gottschalk Prize, from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

In addition to writing his book, Brown collaborated with a Radcliffe fellow who helped advance his work as producer and director of research for the documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, a film about a pioneering American anthropologist of African studies and one of the most controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century—Melville Jean Herskovits.  

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