George H.W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award
A football player at Yale, Dr. Brown was an honorable mention All-Ivy League selection in 1988 and was part of the Bulldogs' 1989 Ivy League Championship team. He earned a Rhodes Scholarship and Yale's Roosevelt L. Thompson Award for Community Service as a senior in 1990. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Yale, he went on to earn his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1994. From 1994 to 1996, he served as a special assistant to Treasury Undersecretary for Law Enforcement Ronald K. Noble.
A professor at Columbia University, Dr. Brown is a historian of Britain and the British empire. His research currently centers on the history of European experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, continuing earlier work on the rise and fall of slavery in the British Empire. At Columbia he has served as the Director of the Society of the Fellows in the Humanities, Chair of the University-Wide Tenure Review Advisory Committee and as the inaugural Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. In 2016 he received the Faculty Mentoring Award from the University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for excellence in doctoral teaching and training. He has worked as an advisor and on-screen commentator for multiple historical documentaries, including the "African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and "Benjamin Franklin," a Ken Burns film.
Dr. Brown's published work has received prizes in four distinct fields of study – American History, British History, Atlantic History and the history of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance.
Prior to coming to Columbia in 2007, Dr. Brown spent eight years on the faculties of Rutgers University and The Johns Hopkins University.
