Kerri Greenidge

Kerri K. Greenidge is an American historian and former academic. Her book Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, a biography of civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize. and the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge.

Biography Greenidge was the Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, director of American Studies and co-director of the African American Trail Project at Tufts' Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.

Previously Greenidge worked as a historian for the Boston African American National Historic Site, under the auspices of which she wrote and published Boston Abolitionists, a short history of the role that Black leaders in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood played in the Abolitionist Movement in the pre–Civil War era. Her research focuses on the role that African-American literature has played in the Civil Rights Movement and particularly its more radical expressions in Boston during the Progressive Era, and its intersection with populism in the Democratic Party.

Greenidge's 2022 book The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in biography. In a glowing review, the New York Times noted that Greenidge established "the [Grimke] sisters' contributions to abolition and women's rights were undergirded by the privileges they reaped from slavery."

Smithsonian named the book one of the ten best history books of 2022. It was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History in the same year. In 2023, the book also won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association, but it was withdrawn after serious allegations to the work were raised and the publisher pulled the book. Concerns have also been raised by historian Stephen Fox regarding Greenidge's 2019 book Black Radical.

Publications

Recognition 2020 - Mark Lynton History Prize