Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities; Professor of History; Director, Center for Antiracist Research
African American history, History of Racism and Antiracism, American Intellectual History
IBRAM X. KENDI is a National Book Award-winning author of fourteen books for adults and children, including nine New York Times bestsellers—five of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor.
Professor Kendi is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest author to win that award. He also authored the international bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, which was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” Professor Kendi’s other bestsellers include How to Raise an Antiracist and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, co-edited with Keisha Blain, which as a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. Professor Kendi’s first book, The Black Campus Movement, won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize.
Professor Kendi has published several essays in books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. He co-edits the Black Power Series at NYU Press with historian Ashley Farmer.
Professor Kendi has been visiting professor at Brown University, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University. He was also elected to the Society of American Historians.
In 2020, Time magazine named Professor Kendi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius Grant.”