MMUF PhD Ben Vinson Announced as Howard University’s Next President

MMUF PhD Ben Vinson III, who currently serves as provost and executive vice president at Case Western University, has ben selected as the 18th president of Howard University.

A historian of Latin America and the African diaspora, Vinson III began his academic career at Dartmouth College, where he received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF). Ben later earned a PhD in Latin American history from Columbia University.

He has held faculty positions at Barnard College, Penn State University, and Johns Hopkins University, as well as a deanship at George Washington University. Ben also co-led the Humanities in Leadership Learning Series (HILLS) program at Case Western University, which was funded by the Mellon Foundation to nurture leadership development and diversity in the humanities.

His book Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (2019) was awarded the Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History.

Ben is one of several MMUF fellows to become college presidents, including Sean Decatur (former president of Kenyon College and current president of the American Museum of Natural History), Brian Johnson (former president of Tuskegee University and current president of Warner Pacific University), and Aisha Francis (current president and chief executive officer of Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology).

He is slated to begin his tenure at Howard University on September 1, 2023.