Mr. Loggins is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at Amherst University. His research and teaching interests are in black political thought, religious studies, and modern and contemporary democratic theory. He is about to publish his first book, which he co-authored, that “explores a critical theory of racial capitalism in the work of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Mr. Loggins describes his lecture: "When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the now famous formulation in The Souls of Black Folk that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,' he was issuing something of a prophecy. Du Bois foresaw catastrophe in a failure to regard the flourishing of African-Americans in the United States as of central concern in the American polity. Souls imagined racial domination as a shared 'democratic' catastrophe, and one that can be understood as taking on world significance in his later work. In seeing the catastrophe of racial domination as shared, Souls established Du Bois as a towering political theorist on the question of what freedom demands on both sides of the color line."