Tommie Shelby, a 1990 graduate of FAMU, stepped in to lead the department effective October 1, 2018, following the promotion of former Chair Lawrence Bobo.
Previous chairs of the department include Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1991-2006) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (2006-2013).
According to the Harvard Crimson, “At Florida A&M, Shelby was certainly not the norm. Most students, he says, sought to gain admission to the School of Business Administration, a program that was successful in landing students business school positions and jobs after college. Shelby, on the other hand, embarked on a period of discovery that would eventually lead him to his calling: philosophy. He began flitting through departments—first psychology, then sociology. Finally, in a course on religion, one of his professors pointed him in the direction of philosophy.”
After he completed his B.A. at FAMU, Shelby earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. He then taught at Ohio State University for two years before coming to Harvard as the Department of African and African American Studies was building its academic “Dream Team.” His colleagues included Gates, Cornel West, and K. Anthony Appiah.
Shelby quickly established himself as one of Harvard’s rising stars by earning tenure and “full professor” rank in 2007.
He is the author of the groundbreaking We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, a book that re-envisions the role of black solidarity as a tool for fighting racism in the post-Civil Rights Movement era.