Kerri Greenidge Out at Tufts After Experts Flag Errors in Prize-Winning Book
Kerri Greenidge’s celebrated 2022 book The Grimkes was once treated like a major academic win.
The book, which focused on a slaveholding family tied to the abolitionist movement, won praise from big names in publishing and history. Publishers Weekly placed it on a top-books list. The American Historical Association gave Greenidge the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, an award tied to women’s history and feminist theory.
Now the story looks very different.
Greenidge, a black feminist historian, is no longer listed in the same tenured role at Tufts University, where she had been an associate professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Her book has also come under fire from scholars who say it contains factual problems, missing support, and citation issues.
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One of the early critics was Myra Glenn, a retired American history professor from Elmira College. Glenn was reviewing The Grimkes for a journal in 2024 when she began questioning the sourcing.
“I said, ‘Where is she getting this?’” Glenn said. “Boy, it became a major problem.”
Glenn’s review was blunt. She wrote, “All too often Greenidge lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims. Her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”
One issue Glenn raised involved letters Greenidge cited as being held by the University of Michigan. According to Glenn, they were not there.
Greenidge has denied the most serious claims against her. She has also framed the criticism as part of a broader attack on black women in academia.
“I am heartbroken that a field I have given my life to can treat me this way,” Greenidge said. “The attack on Black women academics is real.”
She added, “I have never plagiarized anything in my life,” and, “I have never fabricated anything.”
Still, Greenidge acknowledged there may have been citation problems, saying, “Are there citations that were misattributed? Probably.”
Tufts has not publicly detailed exactly when Greenidge and the university separated. Patrick Collins, a Tufts representative, said the school was aware as early as December 2022 that critics believed the book “contained multiple errors of fact and failed to give appropriate credit to the work of another.”
Collins said Tufts then brought in outside reviewers.
“The university initiated a thorough peer review involving a panel of external scholars of American history which identified multiple errors of fact and citation,” Collins said.
He also said, “In keeping with its commitment to ethical conduct in research, the university proactively moved to correct the public record by informing publisher W.W. Norton of the peer review findings.”
The book no longer appears to be available on Norton’s website.
Greenidge has said the university’s review began after a complaint from a white woman against whom Greenidge sought a restraining order. Tufts rejected the idea that bias drove the process.
“The independent review by outside experts in the field was fair, fact-based, thorough, and objective,” Collins said. “We stand by the review and strongly deny any allegations of bias.”
The questions have not stopped with The Grimkes. Greenidge’s 2019 book Black Radical, about civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, also drew concern from Stephen Fox, who wrote a 1970 biography of Trotter.
“It seems well done, except when you look at the footnotes,” Fox said, explaining that he could not locate some cited material through the sources Greenidge listed.
“I started to think maybe it wasn’t just sloppy,” he said. “I think it’s something deeper.”
For now, Greenidge denies plagiarism and fabrication. But the outside review, the publisher’s apparent pullback, and the questions from other historians have left one of academia’s once-praised books facing a very different kind of attention.