INTERVIEWS & TALKS
New Books Network
Byrd examines the multitude of responses by African American leaders towards Haiti following the Civil War and going into the 20th Century.
Listen to full podcast on New Books Network
The Page 99 Test
Byrd applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti, and reported the following.
Dr. Brandon R. Byrd is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on black internationalism. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022) and of Haiti for the Haitians by Louis-Joseph Janvier (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).
Dr. Byrd’s scholarship has appeared in journals such as Slavery & Abolition, The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Haitian Studies, and Diplomatic History as well as popular outlets, including The Washington Post, GQ, and Andscape. Support for his research has come from numerous institutions and organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass-Amherst, the Marcus Garvey Foundation, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is currently working on a biography of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, which has received recognition and funding from the University of Kansas Libraries and the Biographers International Organization.
In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Byrd is a co-editor of the Black Lives and Liberation series published by Vanderbilt University Press and a co-editor of Modern Intellectual History.
A native of North Carolina, Dr. Byrd earned his BA from Davidson College, an MA in History from the College of William & Mary, and a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives with his family in Nashville, where he is currently an Associate Professor of History and African American & Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University.