Professor Ben Vinson III is Provost and Executive Vice President at Case Western Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio. He is also a Professor of History at Case Western’s Department of History. A graduate of Dartmouth and Columbia universities, Professor Vinson served on the faculties of Barnard College and Pennsylvania State University before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2006 as a professor of history and founding director of its Centre for Africana Studies.

Professor Vinson is a historian of Latin America whose scholarship focuses on colonial Mexico, with particular emphasis on race and the African presence in Mexico. He is the author and editor of a number of works, including Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free‐Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (published in 2001), Flight: The Life of Virgil Richardson, A Tuskegee Airman in Mexico (published in 2004), Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, co‐edited with Matthew Restall and published in 2009, and Africans to Colonial Spanish America, co‐edited with Sherwin K. Bryant and Rachel O’Toole, and published in 2012.

His most recent work, Before Mestizaje: Lobos, Moriscos, Coyotes and the Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge University Press) is the subject of episode 18 of History Hub’s podcast series – ‘Kingdom, Empire and Plus Ultra: conversations on the history of Portugal and Spain, 1415-1898′.

Before Mestizaje is an examination of race and caste in colonial Mexico, and opens new dimensions on the history of these issues in Latin America by examining what Vinson refers to as ‘extreme’ caste groups in Mexico. Through examining the lives and experiences of these groups and others, the work seeks a deeper understanding between the idea of Mestizaje and the colonial caste system, by arguing that if we are to understand the concept of Mestizaje, we must understand earlier forms of racial mixture, hybridity, and elasticity that served as its precursor in the Spanish colonial world.

Ben Vinson’s conversation with series host Dr. Edward Collins is now available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and Soundcloud.