Email: kburrell@hostos.cuny.edu
Office Tel: 718-518-6823
Biography: 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,” to be included in Black Citizens and American Democracy: Fighting for the Soul of the Nation (University of Florida Press, 2025), and a forthcoming encyclopedia entry on “Lynching in New York State” to be included in Terrible Legacy: Encyclopedia of Lynching in America (ABC-CLIO/Bloomsbury, 2025). He is currently working 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. He will also be contributing a chapter to the Handbook of American Violence (Routledge, 2026) about New York State lynchings during the nineteenth century. Dr. Burrell is also proud to have been born and raised in Harlem, and is now proud to live in the Bronx.
Courses Typically Taught:
HIS 210 U.S. History through the Civil War
HIS 211 U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present
HIS 214 Modern African American History