Dr. David Sterling Brown—a Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies scholar—is Assistant Professor of English and a proud 2006 Trinity alumnus. His antiracist research, which centers on pedagogy and on how racial ideologies circulate in and beyond the early modern period, is published or forthcoming in numerous peer-reviewed and public venues such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Literature Compass, Radical Teacher, Shakespeare Studies, Hamlet: The State of Play, White People in Shakespeare and Los Angeles Review of Books. His forthcoming book projects, one of which is under contract with Cambridge University Press, examine how whiteness operates in Shakespearean drama. Through his current Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship, Dr. Brown has a 2021-2022 residency with The Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by Claudia Rankine. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and an engaged academic citizen, Brown sits on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey; and he is an executive board member of the Race Before Race conference series. 

A passionate and innovative pedagogue, Dr. Brown pushes his students to pursue the ideas that intrigue them most. He trains students to close read texts and he encourages them to take intellectual risks. By discussing critical issues such as power, class, sexuality, gender and race in the classroom, he enables his students to identify ways in which the past intrudes into and informs the present. He first experimented with this pedagogical approach while serving as Trinity's 2013 Ann Plato Predoctroal Fellow in English. During the fellowship, he developed his signature course, "(Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the Color-Line," which combines the study of English Renaissance drama and African-American literature.