Assistant Professor in History at Harvard University, Vincent Brown is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice, who teaches courses in early American history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery. He is currently writing Specter in the Canes: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. The book shows how people in Jamaican slave society strove to achieve their political ambitions and communal desires through the cultural practices that related the living to the dead. At the Film Study Center, Brown is producing Melville and the Motherland, an audiovisual documentary about Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering anthropologist who established the study of the African diaspora in the United States.