A lifelong Connecticut resident and an Associate Professor of English with tenure at his undergraduate alma mater, Trinity College (Hartford, CT), Dr. David Sterling Brown is an award-winning Shakespeare and critical race studies scholar whose research, teaching and public speaking interests include African-American literature, dramatic literature, mental health, gender, performance, sexuality and the family.

His book, Shakespeare’s White Others, was published by Cambridge University Press and was endorsed officially by Dr. Patricia Akhimie (Folger Institute, Director), Dr. Bernadette Andrea (UC Santa Barbara, professor), Keith Hamilton Cobb (actor, playwright), Simon Godwin (Artistic Director, Shakespeare Theatre Company), Claudia Rankine (poet, essayist, playwright, editor, NYU professor), Dr. Melissa E. Sanchez (UPenn, professor), Dr. Emma Smith (University of Oxford, professor) and Dr. Tukufu Zuberi (UPenn, professor). Shakespeare’s White Others is also available as an audiobook, narrated by the author. Brown is creator of the 3D/virtual-reality David Sterling Brown Gallery and he is curator of the gallery’s first exhibition “Visualizing Race Virtually,” a visual complement to his Shakespeare’s White Others.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Dr. Brown is an alumnus of NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (M.A. and Ph.D. in English). Brown, a first-generation college student, was the first Trinity alumnus to be awarded the College’s Ann Plato Fellowship in 2013. The fellowship enabled him to teach Trinity students and to create and publish about his signature literature course: (Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the Color-Line.

Prior to entering academia, Dr. Brown worked as the Connecticut Recruitment Director for Teach For America (TFA), a national non-profit in the education sector. At TFA, he focused on educating diverse audiences about America’s education achievement gap; and he solidified his passion for activism, which is essential to the kind of scholarly research he produces.

His pro-Black scholarship, centering on pedagogy and on how racial ideologies circulate in and beyond the early modern period, is published in numerous peer-reviewed and public venues such as Shakespeare Studies, White People in Shakespeare, Literature Compass, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy, Hamlet: The State of Play, The Sundial, Public Books and Los Angeles Review of Books.