Brandon M. Terry

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. A scholar of black political thought, Brandon is the author of The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement: Political Theory and the Historical Imagination (Harvard University Press, forthcoming) and editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/Forum, 2018) and To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018), with Tommie Shelby.

At Radcliffe, he is working on two projects. “To Save the Soul of America: Martin Luther King and a New Public Philosophy” aims to move beyond King’s iconic activism to recover his philosophical writings for an age of disorientation and despair. The book explores how King’s philosophy can conceptually and normatively sharpen professional philosophy and contemporary political struggles where questions of peace, justice, dignity, and democracy are concerned. Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophesy and Peril (Penguin Random House, forthcoming) concerns the political thought and legacy of Malcolm X for pressing academic and activist debates about crime, political theology, identity politics, and internationalism.

Terry earned a PhD with distinction in political science and African American studies from Yale University, an MSc in political theory research at Corpus Christi College Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in government and African and African American studies from Harvard College.