Khalil Gibran Muhammad speaks on race and capitalism as part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is 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. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University.

Khalil’s scholarship and teaching examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern US history. He is a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, and is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies.

He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including Slavery by Another Name (2012) and the Oscar-nominated 13th (2016). Khalil was an associate editor of The Journal of American History and an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He holds two honorary doctorates and is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, The Museum of Modern Art, The Barnes Foundation, The Nation magazine, and the advisory boards of Cure Violence and The HistoryMakers.

A native of Chicago’s South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in economics in 1993, and then joined Deloitte & Touche, LLP, as a staff accountant until entering graduate school. He earned his PhD in US history from Rutgers University.