Russell Rickford specializes in African American political culture after World War II, the Black radical tradition, and transnational social movements.

His book, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination, received the 2016 Hooks Institute National Book Award and the 2017 OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. He is currently working on a book about Guyana and African American radical politics in the 1970s.

Rickford is active in Einaudi's inequalities, identities, and justice global research priority and contributes to IIJ's global Blackness events.