A.B. Wilkinson

A.B. Wilkinson is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, completed the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago, and earned his PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley. At UNLV, he teaches courses on Colonial North America, the U.S. Revolutionary Era, and early U.S. History. He also has research and teaching interests in African American history, Native American history, Ethnic Studies, and critical race theory in the wider Americas, including Latin America and the Caribbean.

Dr. Wilkinson specializes in studies of mixed-heritage peoples and ideas regarding ethnoracial mixture in colonial America and the United States. His first book is titled Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America.  The book was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020 and appears in the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.  Blurring the Lines explores the historical origins of U.S. mixed-race ideologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonial period.  Through this research, Dr. Wilkinson provides a detailed examination of those having blended African, European, or Native American ancestry and explains how we first came to think about “mixed people” in British America, before the founding of the United States.