Ben Vinson III Re-Appointed as NHC Presidential Scholar-in-Residence

The National Humanities Center (NHC) is pleased to announce the re-appointment of Dr. Ben Vinson III as Presidential Scholar-in-Residence for 2026–27.

The Presidential Scholar-in-Residence initiative was established by NHC president and director Blair LM Kelley to recognize the accomplishments of distinguished scholars and humanities leaders and invite them to participate in the robust intellectual life of the Center.

Ben Vinson III is an award-winning historian of the African diaspora in Latin America and a respected leader in higher education. He is the immediate past president of the American Historical Association (AHA) and previously served as the 18th president of Howard University and provost of Case Western Reserve University. A renowned scholar of Afro-Mexican history, Vinson’s landmark book, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico, won the prestigious Howard F. Cline Book Prize.

Vinson has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Commission; the National Humanities Center; the Social Science Research Council; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.

He also served on the faculties of Barnard College and Penn State University before joining Johns Hopkins University as a professor of history and founding director of its Center for Africana Studies. At Johns Hopkins, he served as vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary studies and graduate education before becoming dean of George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

Vinson is a member of the board of the National Humanities Center, serving as chairman from 2018 until 2023. He is also a member of the board of the National Humanities Alliance. He has served on the board of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and in leadership positions for the Academy of Arts and Science’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Leadership, the American Historical Association, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Association of American Universities’ Advisory Board for Racial Equity in Higher Education.