Rachel L. Swarns

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and associate professor of journalism at New York University, who writes about race and history as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University’s roots in slavery touched off a national conversation about American universities and their ties to this painful period of history. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Biographers International Organization, the MacDowell artist residency program and others.

At the Times, Swarns served as a full-time reporter and correspondent for 22 years. She has reported from Russia, Cuba, Guatemala and southern Africa, where she served as the Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief. She has covered immigration, presidential politics and Michelle Obama and her role in the Obama White House. She also served as a Metro columnist in New York City. As a senior writer for the paper, she helped to lead and innovate on coverage of issues of race and ethnicity.

In 2018, she joined NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she focuses on American slavery and its legacies. At the Institute, she serves as the director of a new research initiative, “Hidden Legacies: Slavery, Race and the Making of 21st Century America,’’ which seeks to deepen Americans’ understanding of the connections between slavery and contemporary institutions.

Her latest book, The 272: The Families who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, emerged from her reporting at the Times and focuses on Georgetown and the Catholic Church and their roots in slavery. It was selected as one of the notable books of 2023 by the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, Time magazine, The Washington Post, the Chicago Public Library and Kirkus Reviews. The 272 won a 2024 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, which honors authors whose landmark works have made significant advances in their scholarly fields.

Swarns is also the author of American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, which traces the journey of Mrs. Obama’s forbears from slavery to the White House in five generations. American Tapestry was ranked as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the year’s best biographies by Booklist.

She is a co-author of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives, published by Black Dog & Leventhal in 2017, which explores the history of hundreds of images that languished for decades in the New York Times archives.

Swarns, who was born and raised in New York City, graduated from Stuyvesant High School, Howard University (B.A. in Spanish and Black Diaspora studies) and the University of Kent in Canterbury, England (M.A. in International Relations.)