Derrick P. Alridge is professor of education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. He is also the founding director of the Center for Race and Public Education in the South at UVA's Curry School of Education. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge’s work examines American education with foci in African American education and the civil rights movement. He is the author of The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (2008) and co-editor, with James B. Stewart and V.P. Franklin, of Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (2011). Alridge is currently writing The Hip-Hop Mind: Ideas, History, and Social Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press) and is co-editor, with Neil Bynum and James B. Stewart, of The Black Intellectual Tradition in the United States in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press). He has published numerous articles in journals such as History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and The Journal of Negro Education.

Alridge serves as an associate editor for The Journal of African American History and is on the editorial board of the African American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives.

Alridge is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, former postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, and he serves as a distinguished lecturer for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He is a 2016 recipient of the Lyle Spencer Research Award for his scholarship on teachers’ activism during the civil rights era and a 2018 recipient of UVA’s John T. Casteen, III Diversity - Equity - Inclusion Leadership Award.

Alridge is the founder, director, and principal investigator of Teachers in the Movement, an oral history project, and principal investigator of the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site—Ethnographic Resource Study with the National Park Service.

Professor Alridge currently serves as president of the History of Education Society, USA.