Campus Directory

Pronouns he, him, his, his, himself

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit History Department

Title Professor and Chair of History

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Stevenson College
Cowell College
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Legal Studies
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Slavery
African Diaspora
Atlantic World
History
Race
African American / Black Studies
World History
Digital Humanities
US History

Web Site

Primary Office Location Stevenson College Academic Building
220 Stevenson College

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Fall 2025: Tuesdays, 9:30-11:30am (in person)

Mail Stop Stevenson Academic Services

Biography, Education and Training

Greg O’Malley is a historian of slavery, the slave trade, and early America.

He is professor and department chair in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, received four awards: The America Historical Association’s Forkosch Prize for British history; the AHA’s Rawley Prize for Atlantic history; The Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association; and the Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians. The book examines a brutal network for distributing enslaved Africans throughout North America and the Caribbean after their survival of the Atlantic crossing.

O’Malley is also co-creator (with Alex Borucki) of the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, a free online research tool that documents more than 35,000 human trafficking voyages from one port in the Americas to another.

His second book, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution, is forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press (February 2026). It offers a life history of a man born enslaved in colonial Virginia, whose attempts to escape bondage resulted in wide-ranging travels, captivities, and re-enslavements, illuminating both enslaved people’s resistance and the powerful barriers to their escape. David George finally found emancipation by fleeing the emerging United States and running to the British Army during the Revolutionary War.

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 2006
M.A., Johns Hopkins University, 2003
B.A., Boston University, 1999

Research Interests

Colonial British America and the Caribbean; the Atlantic world; slavery and the slave trade

Awards, Honors and Grants

Public Scholar Fellowship, 2021, National Endowment for the Humanities (for The Escapes of David George)

Digital Extension Grant, 2020, to expand the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, American Council of Learned Societies

Barbara S. Mosbacher Short-Term Research Fellowship, 2019, John Carter Brown Library (Brown University)

Edna and Norman Freehling Fellowship, 2016, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant, 2016, National Endowment for the Humanities

Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize, 2015, given by the American Historical Association for British, British imperial, or British Commonwealth history

James A. Rawley Book Prize, 2015, given by the American Historical Association for Atlantic History

Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award, 2015, given by the Southern Historical Association to "a distinguished book in southern history.”

Elsa Goveia Book Prize, 2013-2014, given biennially by the Association of Caribbean Historians

Adair Award 2012 ("given biennially to the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly during the preceding six years.")

Omohundro Institute of Early American Histoy and Culture, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2011)

American Council of Learned Societies, Oscar Handlin Fellow (2010)

Cappon Award (for "best article" in the William & Mary Quarterly, 2009)

Selected Presentations

"Ask Historians" Reddit AMA, on the Atlantic Slave Trade, Oct. 19, 2015

Selected Publications

• The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution (St. Martin's Press, 2026)
• Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
• "Slavery's Converging Ground: Charleston's Slave Trade as the Black Heart of the Lowcountry"
• "Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century," co-authored with Alex Borucki, in a special issue of the Brazilian journal, Tempo, called "O tráfico de escravos africanos: Novos horizontes"
• "Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619-1807" William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 66 (2009), 125-172.
• "Slave Trading Entrepôts and their Hinterlands: Continued Forced Migrations after the Middle Passage to North America" in Gleeson and Lewis, eds., Ambiguous Anniversary
• Diversity in the Slave Trade to the Colonial Carolinas,” in Wood and LeMaster, eds., Creating and Contesting Carolina.

Courses HIS 2B, The World Since 1500
HIS 110B, Revolutionary America, 1740-1815
HIS 111, Popular Conceptions of Race in U.S. History, 1600-Present
HIS 116, Slavery Across the Americas
HIS 158C, Slavery in the Atlantic World: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives
HIS 190X, History of the Atlantic World, 1492-1824
HIS 190Y, The Atlantic Slave Trade
HIS 202, Practicing World History (Graduate Seminar)
HIS 210A, The US and the World, to 1877 (Graduate Seminar)
HIS 211, Readings and Research in Early American History (Graduate Seminar)