Quito J Swan

Quito J. Swan is Professor of Africana Studies and History at The George Washington University. A public facing scholar of Black internationalism and the African Diaspora, he has single authored three books—Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism and the African World (New York University Press, 2022), Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) and Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Pasifika Black received the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2023 Best Book in African American History Award. Pauulu’s Diaspora won the African American Intellectual History Society’s 2022 Pauli Murray Book Prize. Swan’s research has garnered fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Texas-Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, Pennsylvania State University’s Humanities Institute, the Wilson International Center, Australia’s University of Queensland, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. He has formerly taught at Indiana University Bloomington, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Howard University. He was an expert witness for the Bermuda Government’s 2020 Commission of Inquiry into Historic Land Losses caused by segregated hotel development in the 1920s and the building of WWII US military bases. Swan’s writings have appeared in journals such as the Radical History Review,the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and the Journal of African American History. His next book project, Born as a Sufferer (Bloomsbury, 2024), explores Dancehall music’s insurgent soundscapes in the long 1980s.