John Harpham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Assistant Professor in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. He is an historian of political thought and intellectual historian. His research examines ideas about slavery, freedom, and race, as well as the relation of such ideas to practices of enslavement and resistance across the Atlantic world. He is at work on a three-volume series about the ideas associated with the origins, development, and eventual abolition of slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic world. The first volume in this series—titled The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery—will be published with Harvard University Press in the Fall of 2025. In addition, he has published academic articles in a number of journals, and his reviews and review essays have appeared in both academic and popular venues. He received his doctorate from the Department of Government at Harvard.
