Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Director, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of the New York Public Library and one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. Khalil holds a doctorate in US history from Rutgers University (2004) and is a former associate professor of history at Indiana University. He 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 is a contributing author of a 2014 National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press). His research focuses on racial criminalization in modern U.S. History.

Khalil’s scholarship has been featured in a number of national print and broadcast media outlets, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR and MSNBC. Muhammad is a former associate editor of The Journal of American History and prior Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his commitment to public engagement, including Crain Business Magazine’s 40 under 40 (2011), Ebony Power 100 (2013) and The Root 100 of Black Influencers (2012 and 2013). He also holds two honorary doctorates from The New School (2013) and Bloomfield College (2014). He serves on the board of The Barnes Foundation, and the editorial boards of Transition magazine and the North Star Series of John Hopkins Press.