Patrick Grey is a historian of the African diaspora in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a concentration on the histories of maroons and freedom seekers in the Atlantic world. His dissertation compares the development of urban maroon communities in the Chesapeake Bay and Guanabara Bay (in the state of Rio de Janeiro) during the peak of chattel slavery in both the northern and southern Atlantic. These communities reveal how freedom seekers adapted rural knowledge and modes of resistance to an urban setting and, ultimately, redefined the meaning of citizenship and political participation in both the U.S. and Brazil.
Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Miami, FL, Patrick is a proud first-generation doctoral student in the Department of History at Georgetown. Before coming to Georgetown, he studied History, Spanish Linguistics and Literature, and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida (UF) . His undergraduate thesis, entitled "Reconceptualizing Resistance to Social Death: Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley’s Journey Across the Atlantic World,” won the UF Dept. of History's Andrew Family Prize for Best Thesis. At Georgetown, he is a Patrick Healy Graduate Fellow and is affiliated with Georgetown's Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies. He previously served as a Data Fellow for the Freedom on the Move project housed at Cornell University. Most recently, in 2026, Grey was named a Totman Fellow at the DC History Center.
In his free time, he likes cooking Peruvian food, writing short stories, and getting lost in Rock Creek Park.