Andrew Kahrl is a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a leading expert on the history of race and economic inequality in 20th century US, with a particular focus on housing, real estate, land use, and tax policy, as well as on the social, legal, and environmental history of beaches, coastal development, and racial segregation in leisure and outdoor recreation. He is the author of three award-winning books and numerous articles in leading academic journals. His most recent book, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (published in 2024), received the Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power and honorable mention for the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association, and was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. He is also the author of the books Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018), which was named best non-fiction book for 2018 by the Connecticut Center for the Book; and The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South, which received the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians. Kahrl also served as the Principal Investigator and co-author of the African American Outdoor Recreation National Historic Landmark Theme Study for the National Park Service.

 In addition to his scholarship, Kahrl writes regularly for newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Boston Review, and Jacobin, and has appeared on a variety of media outlets, including NPR, C-Span, and Bloomberg. He is active in public affairs, working often with policymakers, litigants, nonprofits, community groups, and educators on issues related to his research, and has served as an expert witness in cases concerning housing, land use, and local tax policies. He is a frequent public speaker on topics including the history of taxation and public spending, African American landownership and land loss, and beaches and coastal development, and has given over 100 public lectures throughout the United States as well as Europe.

 Kahrl has received fellowships and major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.  Kahrl is the Director of the Institute for Public History at UVA and serves on the Board of Trustees of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. He also hosts his own music and interview-format show on the community radio station WTJU.

 Kahrl received a B.A. in History from Kenyon College and a Ph.D. in History from Indiana University. A native of Ohio, Kahrl and his family live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

TOPICS: History, Race, Econonics