John Harris is a historian of slavery and abolition in the United States and Atlantic World. He is McDonald-Boswell Associate Professor at Erskine College.

Harris’s first book, The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage, was published by Yale University Press in 2020. The Last Slave Ships has been described as “a remarkable piece of scholarship” (The New Republic), “gripping” (The New York Review of Books), and “timely” (The Nation).

Harris is currently writing a biography - also with Yale - about Emilio Sanchez, a Cuban-American spy who worked for the British in New York against the illegal slave trade. For more on Sanchez, see Harris’s article in Smithsonian Magazine. Harris is represented by literary agent Deirdre Mullane for this project.

Harris was born in Northern Ireland and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Queen’s University Belfast. He immigrated to the United States in 2008 and worked as a public historian in Charleston, South Carolina before completing Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins University. He has been awarded several prizes for excellence in teaching.