Vera Institute of Justice

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the inaugural Professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project. He is Board Chair of the Vera Institute of Justice, and a WGBH contributor to Boston Public Radio. He is the former Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global Black history. He co-hosted the Pushkin Industries podcast Some of My Best Friends Are.

Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of systemic racism, structural inequality, and democracy in U.S. History. He is the award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America and recently co-chaired a National Academies of Science study, Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice. His writing and scholarship have been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, such as the New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, Moyers and Company, MSNBC, and the New York Times, which includes his sugar essay for The 1619 Project. He has appeared in several feature-length documentaries, including Amend: The Fight for America, the Oscar-nominated 13^th, and Slavery by Another Name (2012). Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University, an associate editor of The Journal of American History, and an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society.

Khalil serves on the boards of The Museum of Modern Art, Cure Violence Global, The New York Historical Society, and The Nation magazine, as well as the advisory boards of Common Justice, The HistoryMakers and the Lapidus Center for the Study of Transatlantic Slavery. He holds honorary doctorates from The New School and Bloomfield College, and a Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He is an award-winning teacher and has received several awards for his commitment to public engagement, including Ebony Power 100, The Root 100 of Black Influencers, ERASE Racism’s Abraham Krasnoff Courage and Commitment Award, BPI Chicago’s Champion of the Public Interest Award, The Fortune Society’s Game Changer Award, Crain’s New York Business magazine 40 under 40.

A native of Chicago’s South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics and then joined Deloitte as a staff accountant until entering graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University and started his academic career at Indiana University.