Gregory O'Malley
Professor and Chair of History
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Humanities Division
Professor and Chair of History
Faculty
Stevenson College
Cowell College
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Legal Studies
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Stevenson College Academic Building
220 Stevenson College
Summer 2025: by appointment (email)
Stevenson Academic Services
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
Colonial British America and the Caribbean; the Atlantic world; slavery and the slave trade
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)
"Ask Historians" Reddit AMA, on the Atlantic Slave Trade, Oct. 19, 2015
- 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.