Ben Vinson III

Vinson was originally from Rapid City, South Dakota, where his father served in the United States Air Force.[4] He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and PhD from Columbia University.[5] He served on the faculties of Barnard College and Pennsylvania State University before joining Johns Hopkins University as a professor of history and served as the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of Latin American History and vice dean of centers, interdisciplinary studies and graduate education. He also helped found Johns Hopkins' Center for Africana Studies and served as its founding director.[6][7] In 2013, he became dean of George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.[8][9]

As dean of GWU's Columbian College, he led the integration of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design into the college and opened a $275 million interdisciplinary science and engineering building.[10] He also spearheaded diversity initiatives including the Cisneros Hispanic Leadership Institute that provides funding for high school juniors from their undergraduate to post-doctoral studies.[4][11]

Vinson has been chairman of the board of the National Humanities Center since 2018.[12][13] He is also a vice president of the American Historical Association[14] and president of the Conference on Latin American History.[15][16]

Vinson is considered one of the country's foremost historians of Latin America.[4] His scholarship has focused on the African presence in colonial Mexico and has authored books on the African American experiences in Mexico and Afro-Mexican experiences in the United States.[8] His book Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico, won the 2019 Howard Cline Book Prize in Mexican History for the best work on Mexico by the Latin American Studies Association.[17]