Robert Trent Vinson

Commonwealth Professor (AAS)

Leadership Appointment

Director, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies

Office Address

101 Minor Hall

Biography

Robert Trent Vinson is the Commonwealth Professor of African American & African Studies, the Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies at the University of Virginia, and a Research Associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Vinson earned his Ph.D. in African History from Howard University. He is a scholar and teacher of 19th and 20th century African & African Diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Vinson has published numerous books and articles, including The Americans Are Coming!: African Americans in 20th century South Africa and Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela. He is currently completing two co-authored book projects, Zulu Diasporas: Ideas of Africa & Africans in African American Politics & Popular Culture, and Crossing the Water: African Americans and South Africa, 1890-1965.

Before joining the University of Virginia in 2020, Vinson taught at Washington University in St. Louis and William & Mary, where he was the first Chair of the Lemon Project, which documents, preserves and disseminates scholarship that uncovered William & Mary’s long histories of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. From 2019 to 2023, Vinson also served as President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), the world’s premier professional organization of African and African Diaspora scholars and was also an Executive Board member of the African Studies Association (2021-24). Vinson also is currently co-editor of the Carter G. Woodson book series at the University of Virginia press, specializing in both the local-African American histories in Virginia-and the global-African & African Diaspora studies.