email: michael_vorenberg@brown.edu
Michael Vorenberg is the author, most recently, of Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Knopf, release date: March 18, 2025). The book was given an advanced starred review by Kirkus, which called it "a brilliant work and a vital contribution to the canon . . . scholarship of the first order." His first book, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge University Press), was a Finalist for the Lincoln Prize and was the basis for the screenplay of Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln. He is also the author of The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (St. Martin's/Bedford).
He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, which awarded him the Bowdoin Prize for the best graduate essay, the Harold K. Gross Prize for the best dissertation in history, and the Delancey Jay Prize for the best work on human liberties. After receiving his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, and then an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He began teaching at Brown University in 1999. His projects have received funding from various sources, including the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published numerous essays and articles on topics ranging from Lincoln's plans for the colonization of African Americans to the meaning of rights and privileges under the Fourteenth Amendment. From 2004 to 2007, he was a member of Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
