Dr. Sherwin K. Bryant is a scholar of the African Diaspora whose work addresses the histories of slavery, race and colonial rule stretching from the North Andean territories of modern-day Colombia and Ecuador to the coastal lowlands of North Carolina's lower Cape Fear region that comprise Brunswick and New Hanover Counties. 

Bryant's first book, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (UNC Press, 2014) explored the political importance of slavery, showcasing the ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants confronted and challenged Spanish colonials efforts to elaborate Atlantic slavery as a system of race governance.  To date, his work has informed debates about how enslaved rebels and litigants alike influenced and shaped law and jurisprudence in Latin America. 

Bryant was the 2021-22 ACLS-Mellon Scholar and Society Fellow, whose work with the African American Heritage Foundation of Southeastern North Carolina (AAHFSNC) has led to Just Beyond the River: A Black Black Humanities Initiative , an ongoing, community-engaged research project that includes the forthcoming film Just Across the River. The film reveals aspects of Black community life and history along the Gullah-Geechee corridor of southeastern North Carolina and the AAHFSNC's efforts to collect oral histories across the region.

Bryant's work has been funded by the Fulbright and the Ford Foundation, appearing in journals such as The Americas and Colonial Latin American Review. In addition to the film and his ongoing work addressing histories of community formation in Brunswick County, North Carolina, Bryant is currently at work on a book addressing slavery and sovereignty in the Afro-Pacific lowlands of Colombia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.