Department of History

Michael Vorenberg received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, which awarded him the Bowdoin Prize for the best graduate essay, the Harold K. Gross Prize for the best dissertation in history, and the Delancey Jay Prize for the best work on human liberties. After receiving his Ph.D., Professor Vorenberg was a postdoctoral fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, and then an Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He began teaching at Brown University in 1999, became the Vartan Gregorian Assistant Professor in 2002, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2004. His first book, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001.  It was a Finalist for the Lincoln Prize and was used liberally for Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln (2012). He is also the author of The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (St. Martin's/Bedford, 2010).  Currently, he is at work on a book about the ending of the Civil War (under contract with Alfred A. Knopf), and also one on the impact of the Civil War on American citizenship. The projects have received funding from various sources, including the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published numerous essays and articles on topics ranging from Lincoln's plans for the colonization of African Americans to the meaning of rights and privileges under the Fourteenth Amendment. From 2004 to 2007, Professor Vorenberg was a member of Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.