Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
Muhammad is a public intellectual whose work is well known in several fields, including history, sociology, and African American studies. Much of his academic scholarship focuses on race and the construction of criminality in the United States. His first book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010) won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best book in American studies. His current research examines the origins of the carceral state in the United States. Prior to coming to Harvard, Muhammad served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, one of the nation’s premier research facilities dedicated to African American history and the study of the African diaspora.
Muhammad earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from Rutgers University, and was associate professor of history at Indiana University. He is the great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, and son of Ozier Muhammad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer.
