Derrick P. Alridge, a former middle and high school social studies and history teacher, serves as the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge’s scholarship examines education in the U.S. with foci in African American education and the civil rights movement. His books include The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History; The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (with Neil Bynum and James B. Stewart); and Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (with V.P. Franklin and James B. Stewart). Alridge has three new books under contract and forthcoming in 2023. Alridge has published in numerous journals, which include the History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and The Journal of Negro Education. He currently serves as an associate editor for The Journal of African American History.

In 2021, Alridge was a recipient of the Carter G. Woodson Medallion from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. In 2021 and 2022, Education Week listed him among the top 200 most influential scholars in education. In 2020, he was the Tisch Visiting Scholar at Teachers College and delivered the Tisch Lecture. Alridge is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, former postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, and he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He is a former president of the History of Education Society. From 2019 and 2020, he served as a co-chair of the Virginia’s Commission on African American History Education in the Commonwealth. Alridge is the founding director of the Center for Race and Public Education in the South and principal investigator of the Teachers in the Movement Oral History Project.