Trevor Bryant
Professional Profile
Dr. Trevor E. Bryant is a historian of the early modern Atlantic whose research explores the connections between Florida, the Caribbean, and the wider Atlantic world. His work focuses particularly on slavery, colonialism, mobility, and the ways people navigated the political and geographic boundaries of European empires.
As Director of Flagler College’s Public History Program, he works at the intersection of historical scholarship, education, and public engagement by frequently collaborating with students, scholars, museums, historic sites, archives, and community organizations. He is also a Research Fellow at the St. Augustine Foundation Center for Historic Research (SAFCHR), where his research contributes to the study and interpretation of St. Augustine’s history and its connections to the broader Atlantic world. He holds a Ph.D. in Atlantic History from Florida International University and an M.L.A. in Florida Studies from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
Teaching
Bryant teaches courses in U.S., Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic history, as well as historical methods and public history. His courses emphasize the practice of history as much as its content, encouraging students to work with primary sources, evaluate historical arguments, and consider how historians construct and communicate interpretations of the past.
He is particularly interested in helping students connect academic history with the public presentation of the past and in demonstrating how the history of St. Augustine can illuminate larger stories of colonialism, slavery, migration, and cultural exchange.
Research
His current research examines the movement of free and enslaved people across the eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean. His book project, Enslavement, Smuggling, or Wandering: Free and Forced Mobilities in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean, explores how people moved across imperial borders and how those movements challenged colonial governments’ efforts to regulate slavery, migration, and commerce. His broader research interests include Spanish Florida, the history of slavery in the Atlantic world, the Caribbean, borderlands, and the history of St. Augustine.