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. Born in Baltimore, Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College.
An award-winning scholar of African American political thought, political theory, and the politics of race and inequality, Brandon is the author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press). Which develops a novel theory of interpretation to show how competing stories of the civil rights movement circulate through politics and political philosophy, defending a “tragic” account of civil rights and African American history against romantic, liberal accounts and nihilistic, Afropessimist accounts. He is also 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 is currently working on two book projects. The first is on the political thought and judgment of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House), that concerns the political thought and legacy of Malcolm X for pressing academic and activist debates about crime, political theology, identity politics, and internationalism. The second, 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 regarding questions of peace, justice, dignity, and democracy.
Terry has published work in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, The New York Review of Books, Time, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Point, and New Labor Forum and been interviewed by The Ezra Klein Show, Vox, the New York Times, and other media outlets. He currently serves on the boards of Boston Review, Embrace Boston, and NOMOS, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.