John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study

Simon Newman, a Brown 2026 Visiting Fellow, is a world-renowned historian of the social and political history of early America, with particular reference to the American Revolution, the early modern British Atlantic world, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the development of plantation slavery, and historical and modern understandings of American history and society. He continues to publish highly influential, indeed ground-breaking scholarship, on the history of enslaved people, focusing in particular on those who tried to escape to freedom. With the support of the Leverhulme Trust he led a major study of enslaved people who were brought to Scotland and England in the eighteenth century, and who then escaped. He has also worked on research about enslaved people who escaped from their owners in Jamaica and Britain’s other Caribbean colonies. Newman helped initiate and co-wrote a report into the degree to which the University of Glasgow benefitted financially from Atlantic World racial slavery. Glasgow was the first British university to undertake such a study and to develop a program of reparative justice as a result. Newman is currently working on a collaborative digital project on freedom seekers and early American media that will have a public impact.