Brooke Newman: Associate Professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University & Author of "A Dark Inheritance"

Brooke Newman is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University specializing in early modern Britain and the Atlantic world. She’s the author of the award-winning 2018 book, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica and co-editor of the 2014 book Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas.

 Her research on the British monarchy and the history and legacies of slavery has appeared in Slate, Der Spiegel, The Washington Post, The Richmond Times Dispatch, i-news, Sky news, Vox, Smithsonian Magazine, Time, and Yahoo news. She has served as a historical consultant on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and is currently advising The Guardian on the royal family’s historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade. 

Currently, she’s finishing her second book, The Queen’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery (Mariner), an examination into the little-known, centuries-long relationship between the British monarchy and slavery. As The Queen’s Silence will show, the British monarchs and prominent members of the royal family invested in, expanded, and defended the transatlantic slave trade and African bondage for nearly three centuries.