Quito J. Swan is an award winning scholar of Black Studies. He is Professor of Africana Studies and History at the George Washington University, where he directs the University's Africana Studies Program. A historian of Black internationalism and the African Diaspora, he has written four books based on Black internationalism. His most recent book, Born a Sufferah: Dancehall Music's Insurgent Soundscapes (Bloomsbury, 2025), explores Dancehall and global Black protest across the long 1990s. His Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism and the African World (New York University Press, 2022), received the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2023 Best Book in African American History Award. His Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) won the African American Intellectual History Society’s 2022 Pauli Murray Book Prize.
Swan’s research has garnered fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Texas-Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, Pennsylvania State University’s Humanities Institute, the Wilson International Center, Australia’s University of Queensland, Australia's Research Council, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. He has formerly taught at Indiana University Bloomington, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Howard University. He was an expert witness for the Bermuda Government’s 2020 Commission of Inquiry into Historic Land Losses caused by segregated hotel development in the 1920s and the building of WWII US military bases. Swan’s writings have appeared in journals such as the Radical History Review, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and the Journal of African American History. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).
