Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement - A Conversation with Brandon Terry and Joseph R. Winters

Brandon Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. In addition, he is a Faculty Affiliate of American Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for History and Economics. A scholar of African American political thought, Brandon is the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT 2018).

Joseph Winters is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He also holds secondary positions in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of black religious thought, African-American literature, and critical theory. He is the author of Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke 2016) and is at work on a new book project entitled Disturbing Profanity: Hip Hop, Black Aesthetics, and the Volatile Sacred.

Prof. Terry's forthcoming book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press) interrogates the normative and political significance of different narratives of African American history in liberalism, radicalism, and Afro-pessimism through an original synthesis of methods drawn from the philosophy of history, literary theory, and political philosophy. The conversation between Profs. Terry and Winters will explore themes emerging from this project.