Brandon Terry

Brandon Terry

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Director of Graduate Studies
Brandon Terry

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. In addition to these main appointments, Brandon is a Faculty Affiliate of American Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for History and Economics.

Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research as a Michael von Clemm Fellow at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College.

A scholar of African American political thought, Brandon is the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT 2018). He has published work in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Point, and New Labor Forum. For his work, Brandon has received fellowships, awards, and recognition from the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Center for History and Economics, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and Best American Essays.

His next book, The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement: Political Theory and the Historical Imagination (Harvard University Press) interrogates the normative and political significance of different narratives of African American history in liberalism, radicalism, and Afro-pessimism through an original synthesis of methods drawn from the philosophy of history, literary theory, and political philosophy. Following this, he will release a book on the political thought, praxis, and judgment of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House) and an edited collection of essays on African American political thought in the 21st century. My broader academic and advising interests include Black intellectual and political thought, Africana philosophy, contemporary political theory (especially questions of resistance, protest, dissent), African American history, racial politics, poverty, crime, incarceration, and the aesthetics and sociology of hip-hop and “black” youth cultures.

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