African American Thought Advancing Democracy
Lawrie Balfour, Melvin Rogers
As part of the Karsh Institute's "Touchstones of Democracy" series, professors Melvin Rogers (Brown University) and Lawrie Balfour (UVA) examine Rogers’ new book, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought—exploring how thinkers’ “light of faith” was darkened but not extinguished by slavery. WATCH THE VIDEO:
Speakers
Lawrie Balfour
James Hart Professor of Politics, University of Virginia
Lawrie Balfour
James Hart Professor of Politics, University of Virginia
Lawrie Balfour is James Hart Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press) and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Cornell University Press). Her articles on race, gender, and democracy have appeared in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Review, Hypatia, The Du Bois Review, and other journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on Imagining Freedom: Toni Morrison and the Work of Words and several stand-alone projects on reparations.
Balfour is a 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow and member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. She has held fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Melvin Rogers
Professor of Political Science, Brown University
Associate Director of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Brown University
Melvin Rogers
Professor of Political Science, Brown University
Associate Director of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Brown University
Melvin Rogers is professor of political science and associate director of philosophy, politics, and economics at Brown University. He has wide-ranging interests in contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political thought.
He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) and The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023). He is the editor of John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Ohio University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Turner) of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a collection of 30 essays on figures in the tradition of African American political thought. His articles have appeared in major academic journals and popular venues such as Dissent, The Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review.