Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and formerly the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the history of the African diaspora.
Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2011, Dr. Muhammad was an assistant professor of history at Indiana University for five years. While there, he wrote the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America, in which he explored the roots of the popular conception of black criminality in America. Prior to his time working as a professor, Muhammad completed a fellowship at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform agency in New York City. Recently, he wrote an op-ed about the Trayvon Martin case for The New York Times .
Khalil Muhammad is a native of Chicago’s South Side. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s degree in economics. After college, he worked for a time at the financial advisory firm Deloitte & Touche LLP. In 2004 he earned his Ph.D. in American history from Rutgers University, specializing in 20th century and African-American history. Muhammad is the great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, and son of Ozier Muhammad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer.
