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Tommie Shelby (born 1967) is an American philosopher. Since 2013, he has served as the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he is the current chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He is particularly known for his work in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, social theory (especially Marxist theory), and the philosophy of social science.
Before moving to Harvard University as an assistant professor in 2000, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Ohio State University from 1998 to 2000. CV in pdf format, Tommie Shelby website. He was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard from 2004 to 2007. Shelby is the second black scholar to be tenured in the philosophy department at Harvard. The first was Kwame Anthony Appiah, now a professor at New York University.
Shelby served as an editor of Transition Magazine and of the Du Bois Review. In 2015, he was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board. "Neil Brown of Tampa Bay Times and Tommie Shelby of Harvard University are elected to Pulitzer Prize Board", The Pulitzer Prizes, October 29, 2015. In June 2022, he was elected as the Board's 2022-2024 co-chair, serving alongside Poynter Institute President Neil Brown. Shelby also was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Shelby is also the co-editor of Hip-Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason with Derrick Darby. In his review of the book, Tommy J. Curry said that it is "...a great work that inhabits the tension between the sterile thought of the academy and the rich lives of many young urban Americans." Shelby also co-edited Transition 99 with Henry Louis Gates Jr., K. Anthony Appiah and F. Abiola Irele, and is the author of the entry on Black Nationalism in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online.
His second monograph, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2016. His third book, The Idea of Prison Abolition, was published by Princeton University Press in 2022.
Shelby is the son-in-law of Harvard philosopher Thomas Scanlon.
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