Brandon M. Terry

Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences 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. A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, Terry is an award-winning scholar of African American ethics and political thought, political theory, and the politics of race, inequality, and justice. He is the author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard), one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2025. He is editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (MIT, 2018) and, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard, 2018). He is working on two books: Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House), and To Save the Soul of America: Martin Luther King and a New Public Philosophy. His writing and interviews have appeared in New York Review of Books, Time, The Point, The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times, and elsewhere. He currently serves on the boards of Boston Review, Embrace Boston, and NOMOS. His interests in higher education include academic freedom, expanding access, and efforts to build mutually enriching ties between universities, cities, and communities of concentrated disadvantage.