Randy Browne, PhD

Randy M. Browne is a historian of Atlantic slavery who specializes in the British Caribbean.  He recently completed The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Penn Press, 2024), which explores the predicament of enslaved Black drivers, trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers.  Browne’s first book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Penn Press, 2017), focused on the problem of survival in Berbice (part of what is now Guyana) and won the Ohio Academic of History’s Publication Award and the biennial Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians.  Browne’s scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the U.S. Department of Education.  His articles on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New West Indian Guide, and Slavery & Abolition. At Xavier, Browne teaches courses on the African diaspora, slave rebellions, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonial America.