Brett Rushforth
Brett Rushforth is Editor in Chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly, a peer-reviewed academic journal featuring original research and new perspectives on early modern art, literature, history, science, medicine, and material culture. He is also a faculty member (by courtesy) in the Van Hunnick Department of History at the University of Southern California. Before joining the Research Division at The Huntington, he was Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon and the College of William and Mary, where he also served as the book review editor of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. He has published widely on early modern colonialism, slavery, material culture, legal history, and religion.
He is the author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, which examined the enslavement of Native Americans by French colonists and their allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery.
With co-author Christopher Hodson, Rushforth recently completed a book titled Beyond the Ocean: A New History of France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions. It will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2025.
