Michael Eric Dyson, PhD

Michael Eric Dyson is an academic, public scholar, author, Baptist minister, radio host, and seasoned political analyst. A distinguished public speaker and preacher, he is as versed in Bible readings as in hip hop lyrics, and he often interlaces the two. He speaks regularly on the subjects of politics, pop culture, religion, and racial justice. At Vanderbilt University he holds the Centennial Chair and serves as University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies in the College of Arts and Science and University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Divinity School. He has also taught at many other prestigious American universities, including Princeton, Brown, Middlebury, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown. As he says, “Teaching and preaching are at the foundation of everything I do.” Born and raised in Detroit, MI, Dyson became a preacher at age 21, and later earned a bachelor’s in philosophy from Carson-Newman College, where he worked as a cleaner at a machine shop to pay his tuition. He also served as a pastor during his undergraduate years. From there he went on to earn a PhD in religion from Princeton University. His subject is race, class, culture, and religion in America, and he believes that a frank examination of the truth of America’s past and present is the way toward a better future. Paraphrasing an idea from Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, a book that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., carried with him, Dyson says it’s important not to be a “prisoner of the event,” or present moment that one is facing. “We have to use our imagination,” Dyson says, “to borrow from the future.” He has written more than 25 books, and has won the Langston Hughes Medal, an American Book Award, Southern Book Award, and two NAACP Image Awards. In Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, he wrote, “[A]ll of us, from agreeable agnostics to fireand- brimstone Protestants, from devout Catholics to observant Jews, from devoted Muslims to those who claim no god at all, share a language of moral repair. That language is our common meeting ground, our tool of analysis, and yes, our inspiration for repentance, our hope for redemption.” He has also written biographies on Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and Tupac Shakur, among many other figures. His most recent book Represent: The Unfinished Fight for the Vote, was written in collaboration with Marc Favreau. Dyson is married to writer and ordained minister Marcia L. Dyson and has three children and three grandchildren.