Dr. David Sterling Brown—a Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies scholar—is Associate Professor of English and a proud 2006 Trinity alumnus. He is a 2022-2023 Sacred Heart University Shakespeare Scholar in Residence. 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, both under contract with Cambridge University Press, examine how whiteness operates in Shakespearean drama. Through his Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship, Dr. Brown had a 2021-2022 residency with The Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by Claudia Rankine; he is also the dramaturg for Keith Hamilton Cobb's Untitled Othello Project. 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.

Peer-reviewed articles

• “'Blanched with Fear': Reading the Racialized Soundscape in Macbeth," Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 50 (September 2022), 33-43, co-author with Jenner L. Stoever
• “Shake thou to look on't': Shakespearean White Hands," White People in Shakespeare, ed. Arthur L. Little, Jr. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023)
• What  You Will in the Time of COVID-19: Exploring the Digital Arts, Race and Flexible Resistance,” Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, ed. Erin Sullivan, Gemma Allred and Benjamin Broadribb (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2022), co-author with Ben Crystal
  
• (Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the “Sonic Color Line,” Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy, ed. Diana Henderson and Kyle Vitale (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2022)
• “(Un)Just Acts: Shakespeare and Social Justice in Contemporary Performance,” co-author with Sandra Young, Shakespeare Bulletin 39.4 (Winter 2021)
• “‘Unicorns and Fairy Dust’: Talking Shakespeare, Performance and Social (In)Justice with Ayanna Thompson and Farah Karim-Cooper,” Shakespeare Bulletin, 39.4 (Winter 2021)
• “I Feel Most White When I am…: Foregrounding the Sharp White Background of Anchuli Felicia King’s  Keene,” Shakespeare Bulletin, 39.4 (Winter 2021)
• “Code Black: Whiteness and Unmanliness in Hamlet,” Hamlet: The State of Play, ed. Sonia Massai and Lucy Munro (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2021), 101-127
• “‘Hood Feminism’: Whiteness and Segregated (Premodern) Scholarly Discourse in the Post-Postracial Era,” Literature Compass (2020): 1-15
  
• Teaching Guide: “‘Hood Feminism’: Whiteness and Segregated (Premodern) Scholarly Discourse in the Post-Postracial Era,” Literature Compass (2020): 1-3
• “Things of Darkness: ‘The Blueprint of a Methodology’,” The Hare: An Online Journal of  Untimely Reviews in Early Modern Theater, Special Issue (Critical Race Studies) 5.1 (September 2020)  
• “Remixing the Family: Blackness and Domesticity in Titus Andronicus,” Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 111-133
  
• “‘Is Black so Base a Hue?’: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,”  Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, ed. Cassander Smith, et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 137-155
• “(Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the Color-Line,” Radical Teacher No. 105 (Summer 2016): 69-77

Public Scholarship:

• “To Teach Shakespeare for Survival: Talking with David Sterling Brown and Arthur L. Little, Jr.” Public Books, November 2021, co-authored with Arthur L. Little, Jr.
• “Don’t Hurt Yourself: (Anti)Racism and White Self-Harm,” Los Angeles Review of Books (Anti-racism miniseries), July 2021
• “The ‘Sonic Color Line’: Shakespeare and the Canonization of Sexual Violence Against Black Men,” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Sundial, August 2019