FI Advisory Board member Kristopher Bryan Burrell is Associate Professor of History at Hostos Community College—CUNY, in the Bronx, NY. He earned his Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2011.
Dr. Burrell researches and writes about the Black American civil rights movement in New York City. He has contributed chapters on Ella Baker and Mae Mallory’s efforts to ameliorate racial inequities in the NYC public schools to The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (New York University Press, 2019), and on the history of online learning at Hostos to Educational Technology at an Urban Community College (Palgrave McMillan, 2019). He has also published in the Western Journal of Black Studies, Public Seminar, and the Gotham Center Blog for New York City History. Dr. Burrell has a chapter titled, “Towards a Real United States Patriotism: Black Americans’ Centrality to the Pursuit of a Multiracial Democracy,” recently published in Black Citizens and American Democracy: Fighting for the Soul of the Nation (University Press of Florida, 2025). Dr. Burrell is also contributing an encyclopedia entry to The Encyclopedia of Lynching on “Lynchings in New York State,” which should be published in 2026 (Augsburg Fortress Publishers). He will also be contributing a chapter to the Handbook of American Violence (Routledge, 2026) about New York State lynchings during the nineteenth century, titled “Forged through the Crucible of Interracial Violence: New York State Lynchings and the Formation of a Northern White Identity in the Late-Nineteenth Century.” And more recently, Dr. Burrell is beginning work on a chapter for an edited volume about the life and activism of Coretta Scott King, to be published by Yale University Press in 2027. He is also beginning work on a narrative of US history centering social movement activism that seeks to respond to the question of how to lessen political polarization in the United States. It is currently untitled.
Dr. Burrell is proud to have been born and raised in Harlem, and is now proud to live in the Bronx.
