Robert Trent Vinson is the director and chair of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and a research associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is a scholar and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African and African diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. He is the author of The Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa and Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela.