Huey Hewitt

Huey Hewitt is an interdisciplinary historian of political thought, social movements, and African American life and culture. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American intellectual history, global black radicalism, and the interrelationship between gender, sexuality, race, class, politics, and culture.

He is currently completing his first book project, Black Anarchism: The Making of an Alternative Black Radical Tradition—an intellectual history of anarchism in Afro-American thought, from the 1870s through the end of the Black Power era. His next major book project, Panic Politics: Race, Sex, and Fascist Power, will be a U.S. history of race and sex panic in transnational context—probing the power and violence at the heart of moral panics concerning the figure of the black male rapist beginning in the late-nineteenth century, the specter of interracial sex during school desegregation debates, the figure of the homosexual during the gay rights movement, and more recently, the figure of the transgender subject as a threat to women and children.

Hewitt draws on his research when teaching on a variety of subjects in social, intellectual, cultural, and African American history. In addition to foundational courses treating the Civil War and Reconstruction, the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime, and the civil rights and Black Power movements, Hewitt will be offering two specialized courses in the spring of 2027: the first, a class on Michael Jackson in the broader context of America’s musical, cultural, legal, and labor history; and the second, a class on the American intellectual history of scientific racism, studies of sexual dimorphism, and gender essentialism.

Hewitt received his Ph.D. with distinction from Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies, where he was also a Presidential Scholar and Prize Fellow. He also received his M.A. in History from Harvard and his B.A. in History and Black Studies summa cum laude from Amherst College.