Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research announces that historian and higher education leader Ben Vinson III has been appointed a fellow at the center’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI). Vinson’s fellowship follows his recently concluded tenure as president of the American Historical Association, during which he recently delivered his outgoing presidential address, underscoring the stakes and possibilities for higher education and the historical profession in this moment.
“Ben Vinson’s career embodies the ethos of the Hutchins Center: rigorous scholarship, institutional innovation, and a deep commitment to the global histories of people of African descent,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center. “From his pathbreaking work on race and caste in colonial Mexico to his recent leadership at Howard University and the American Historical Association, he has consistently helped us see the African diaspora in new, urgently relevant ways. We are honored that ALARI has been a site where he can finish major projects like AI in Higher Education and continue to reimagine the future of our field.”
“You cannot narrate the consolidation of the field of Afro-Latin American Studies during the last three decades without referencing the work of Ben Vinson III. It is simply not possible,” said Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and director of ALARI. “Vinson’s scholarship has expanded our understandings of the African presence in the region both temporally and spatially. His books are essential reading for anyone in the field.”
ALARI and the Hutchins Center have provided the institutional home where Vinson and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza completed their co‑authored volume, “AI in Higher Education.” Vinson also highlighted his affiliation with ALARI in his work with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, including a recent report addressing the future of democracy, the humanities, and higher education.
“As a fellow at ALARI I have been working on new projects on slavery in Latin America and the evolution of racial mixture in Mexico,” Vinson said. “I’ve also worked on completing a book, with Paul Zeleza, on “AI in Higher Education,” as well as my presidential address for the American Historical Association, which offers reflections on the state of higher education and what historians can do to meet this unique, historic moment. The Institute is a perfect environment for collaboration and intellectual cultivation.”
An award‑winning historian of the African diaspora with a focus on Latin America, he is the author or co‑author of eight books and dozens of articles and has served as editor of The Americas, helping to shape key debates in Latin American and hemispheric history. His book, “Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico,” received the 2019 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, and the project was nurtured at Harvard from its conception at Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History Seminar through the Nathan I. Huggins Lecture Series at the Hutchins Center. His 2024 book project, “Frank Etheridge: Jazz Age Musician of the African Diaspora,” reconstructs the life of a Black musician performing in interracial orchestras abroad during the Jim Crow era, adding a transnational cultural dimension to histories of race and segregation.
Vinson’s appointment as an ALARI fellow builds on a career that bridges scholarship and institutional leadership. He served as the 18th president of Howard University and is past president of the American Historical Association as president and also of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH). Before assuming the presidency at Howard, he was provost and executive vice president at Case Western Reserve University; earlier roles include dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary programs and graduate education at Johns Hopkins University, and director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins. He has also held faculty appointments at Barnard College and Penn State University.
Educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University, Vinson has helped train a generation of scholars and has been recognized with major fellowships and honors. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society and has served on the boards of organizations including the American Council on Education, Fulbright, the National Humanities Alliance, and the National Humanities Center, among others.
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