Vincent Brown, Harvard University

Vincent Brown is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery and directs the History Design Studio. Brown is also the author of the award-winning book The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and producer of the television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. Ladbury has been working with Brown since 2013 when they were commissioned to launch his animated thematic map, Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, which was received to great acclaim.

This year Ladbury was commissioned to launch The History Design Studio’s latest interactive website, www.twoplantations.com, which uncovers the lives of 431 enslaved people in seven multi-generational families at Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica, and Mount Airy plantation in Virginia, family histories which have been painstakingly gathered by fellow historian Richard S Dunn over the last 40 years. TwoPlantations.com, is the interactive companion to a book written by Dunn called A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, for release on Harvard University Press 4 November 2014.

The History Design Studio is a workshop for the most exciting new ideas in multimedia history, a creative space where students and scholars can design new modes of historical storytelling. By stretching the canvas of historical scholarship, studio participants make lasting contributions to the understanding of the past and its many meanings.