John Harpham is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. He is an historian of political thought and an 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 that were 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 on October 1, 2025, with Harvard University Press. 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, and he has served as a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.