Kenneth W. Mack

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kenneth W. Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and an affiliate professor of history at Harvard University. He began his professional career as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to law and history. His book Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press, 2012) appeared on the Washington Post’s list “Best of 2012: 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction,” was selected for the Library of Congress National Book Festival, and earned an honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Award from the Law and Society Association. His is also the coeditor of The New Black: What Has Changed—and What Has Not—with Race in America (New Press, 2013).

At Radcliffe, Mack is working on “The Political Economy of American Civil Rights, 1974–2000,” the first book to examine a significant but often overlooked legacy of the civil rights movement—a set of interconnected arguments about race relations, government, politics, and economic life that carried forward from the 1970s through at least the 1990s. The book will show how this legacy of the movement continues to have profound effects on American politics and culture.

Mack, who earned a PhD in history from Princeton University, has offered commentary on history and politics on Charlie Rose and PBS News Hour and written opinion pieces for the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Root, Time, the Washington Post, and other popular media.