Brett 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 is assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon.
He is the author of Bonds of Alliance, published by University of North Carolina Press, which examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. Bonds of Alliance was honored with multiple awards: the Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians, the Boucher Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society, the FEEGI Biennial Book Prize from the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction and the Wylie Prize from the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery.
Brett is currently completing, with Christopher Hodson, Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press