Howard W. French

Howard W. French is an American journalist, author, and academic whose career has bridged decades of frontline reporting on Africa with deep historical scholarship. He spent more than two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, with extensive postings across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. His reporting from West and Central Africa, where he served as bureau chief, shaped his lifelong commitment to recovering and retelling African history on its own terms. He is currently a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His other books include China's Second Continent, which examines Chinese economic engagement with Africa, and Everything Under the Heavens, a study of Chinese historical and geopolitical imagination. Born in Blackness, published in 2021, represents the synthesis of his journalistic and scholarly work, and is widely regarded as one of the most important recent contributions to the history of the Atlantic world and the African diaspora.