Kerri K. Greenidge

Kerri K. Greenidge is an associate professor in the Departments of History and of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Her recent book The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022) received numerous awards and nominations, including from the American Historical Association. Her previous book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019), received the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize, among other awards.

As a Radcliffe fellow, Greenidge is researching her newest monograph, which uses the intertwined lives of five Black New Englanders, from the mid-18th through the mid-20th century, whose radical politics shaped the Liberal tradition with which the region is often identified. “Black New England” is a sweeping analysis of Blackness as the conscience of America’s Liberal tradition in a region of the country long defined by its racial and political contradictions.

Greenidge earned a PhD in American studies from Boston University. At Tufts, she codirects the African American Trail Project and the Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies initiative. Greenidge also serves on the 10 Million Names scholars’ council and, with Kendra Field and Kyera Singleton, as a researcher for the City of Boston’s Task Force on Reparations. With Field and David Levering Lewis, she cofounded the Du Bois Forum. Greenidge’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the New York Times.