Dr. Keidrick Roy

Intellectual Historian & Political Theorist

Harvard University

Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (Amazon). He works at the intersection of American history, literature, and political thought from the Revolutionary era to the present. Keidrick’s interdisciplinary scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History, New Literary History, English Literary History, and American Political Thought. His public history writing appears in America: The Atlas, published by the Smithsonian Books & Thunder Bay Press. Additionally, his public scholarship has been featured by CBS Sunday Morning, the Harvard Gazette, the Public News Service, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Review of Books, the National Football League, and HBO. 

Keidrick earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. His dissertation, “Jefferson’s Map, Douglass’s Territory: The Black Reconstruction of Enlightenment in America, 1773-1865,” won Harvard’s DeLancey K. Jay Prize for the best work across the University “upon any subject relating to the history or development of constitutional government and free institutions in the United States or Great Britain or any other part of the English-speaking world at any period of history.” It also won Harvard’s Helen Choate Bell Prize for best dissertation on any subject in American literature. 

Additionally, Keidrick has been committed to the work of museum curation and documentary film production to encourage public reflection and dialogue. At the American Writers Museum in Chicago, he was the lead curator for Dark Testament, an exhibition that put the writings of African Americans from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement in conversation with contemporary Black writers and thinkers. He has also served as an exhibition curator for Frederick Douglass’s writings and speeches. At Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Keidrick curated an exhibition on the Nazi racial state, which debuted in 2022. In addition, he is the executive producer of We Are Here Too, a documentary film on race and art in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which is featured in the 2023 SR: Socially Relevant Film Festival in New York City. 

An Outstanding Academy Educator honoree as an Instructor of English at the United States Air Force Academy, an award-winning Teaching Fellow at Harvard, and a former military nuclear operations officer, Keidrick has received research support from the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Pat Tillman Foundation, and Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies. He also serves as a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Contact Keidrick: keidrickroy@fas.harvard.edu or view his CV.