Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. An award-winning scholar of African American political thought, political theory, and the politics of race and inequality, his research examines the intellectual traditions that have shaped struggles for freedom, democracy, and justice in the United States.
He is the author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press) and 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), as well as Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT Press, 2018). His essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals and publications including Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, The New York Review of Books, Time, Boston Review, Dissent, and The Point.
Terry is currently completing two major book projects: Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril, which explores Malcolm X's political thought and legacy, and To Save the Soul of America: Martin Luther King and a New Public Philosophy, which reexamines King's philosophical writings and their significance for contemporary debates about democracy, justice, dignity, and peace. He serves on the boards of Boston Review, Embrace Boston, and NOMOS, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.