Brandon R. Byrd was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina and raised in Raleigh. He is a graduate of Davidson College, the College of William & Mary, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A historian of Black intellectual and social history, he is the author of "The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti" and the co-editor of "Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History" and of "Haiti for the Haitians by Louis-Joseph Janvier." Byrd lives with his family in Nashville, TN, where he is an associate professor of History and African American & Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University.
