Glaude, Eddie Steven Jr.
1968-present · Contribution: 2002-present
Served as founding chair of Princeton University's Department of African American Studies when it became a full academic department in 2015, leading it for more than fourteen years, and became one of the nation's most prominent public intellectuals on race and democracy through bestselling books and regular television commentary
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Impact on the world
After chairing Princeton's Center for African American Studies from 2009 to 2015, Glaude led the successful effort to elevate it to full departmental status, becoming the inaugural chair of the Department of African American Studies and shaping its curriculum around three thematic subfields: African American Culture and Life, Global Race and Ethnicity, and Race and Public Policy; he stepped down as chair in 2023 after guiding the department for over a decade. A scholar of religion as well as history and politics, his first book, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, won the Modern Language Association's inaugural William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize in 2001, and he later served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2017. Glaude reached a much broader public audience with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016) and Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020), both New York Times bestsellers that combine historical scholarship with contemporary political commentary; he appears regularly as a commentator on MSNBC's Morning Joe and Deadline: White House and on NBC's Meet the Press, and writes as a columnist for Time magazine, making him one of the most visible scholarly voices interpreting American racial politics for a general audience.
Life & background
Born September 4, 1968, in Moss Point, Mississippi, to a postal worker father and a shipyard cleaning supervisor mother, Glaude enrolled at Morehouse College at age 16 and earned his B.A. in political science in 1989. He earned an M.A. in African American studies from Temple University and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University, where he has taught since 2002 and currently serves as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies.
Sources
- Princeton University Department of African American Studies; Princeton University Department of Religion; Princeton Magazine
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