Malick W. Ghachem

Malick W. Ghachem is a historian and lawyer and Professor of History and Head of the History Faculty at MIT. His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He also writes and speaks on issues of academic freedom, free expression, and diversity. He teaches courses on Libertarianism, the Age of Revolution, Slavery and Abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics.

Professor Ghachem earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and his doctorate in history from Stanford. He clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami, FL in 2004. A member of the Massachusetts bar, Professor Ghachem practiced law in Boston from 2005 to 2010 for two law firms: Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. For part of that period (2006-2007) he served as a lecturer in MIT’s Political Science Department. Between 2010 and 2013, he taught at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, ME. He is an active member of the bars of Massachusetts and New York.

He has published a wide range of articles in the fields of French colonial and American legal history and is at work on two new projects. The first is a book under contract with Yale University Press entitled “The Conversion of the Jesuits: Slavery, Totalitarianism, and the Catholic Church in Haiti.” The second is a study of institutional neutrality, student protest, and academic freedom from the 1960s to the present.