Kathleen M. Brown

Kathleen M. Brown is the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts & Sciences, specializing in gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. She teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses on comparative slavery, colonial America, history of the body, race and sex in early America, and Atlantic history.

Her educational background includes a Ph.D. (1990) and M.A. (1985) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. (1981) from Wesleyan University. Brown has been instrumental in the Penn & Slavery project since 2017 as the project's lead faculty historian.

Brown's research focuses on the intersections of gender, race, and power in colonial contexts, with particular attention to bodily integrity, cleanliness practices, and the medical and legal dimensions of slavery and abolition. Her work demonstrates how bodily experiences were central to understanding power dynamics in early America and how racial categories were constructed through gendered frameworks.

Her publications reveal consistent scholarly engagement with how bodies—particularly female bodies and Black bodies—were sites of political struggle, medical inquiry, and cultural meaning-making in the early Atlantic world. The trajectory of her work shows an evolution from examining colonial Virginia's gendered power structures to analyzing transatlantic abolitionist movements through the lens of bodily politics.

• Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association (for Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs)
• Organization of American Historians' Lawrence Levine Book Prize for cultural history (for Foul Bodies)
• Society of the History of the Early American Republic Book Prize (for Foul Bodies)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (2015-2016)

Brown has received significant research support through fellowships from the Omohundro Institute for Early American Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She serves as Co-Editor of the Early American Studies monograph series and is affiliated with Penn GSWS, the Center for Research in Feminist Queer and Transgender Studies, Africana Studies, and History and Sociology of Science.