2017 Tillman Scholar

Keidrick Roy

Air Force
Harvard University
Ph.D., American Studies

“Although I leave my uniform behind, I will never leave the service.”

After graduating from the United States Air Force Academy in 2009 and earning his Master’s degree in 2010, Keidrick served in the Air Force nuclear operations career field as a missile combat crew commander, flight commander, and nuclear procedures evaluator. In 2015, he returned to the Air Force Academy, where he taught English as an active duty Captain.

As an instructor at a military institution, Keidrick became interested in the civil-military divide in higher education. In 2017, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded him a grant to lead a project entitled “Beyond Black and Blue: Race and the Future of Civil-Military Relations,” which brought together students and professors from civilian liberal arts colleges, the Air Force Academy, and West Point to discuss strategies for teaching students about race and ethnicity within and across their institutions. The relationships he developed with students and faculty around the country while leading such efforts helped him cultivate more robust connections between teaching and service in both military and civilian contexts.

After earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2022, Keidrick was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he currently works at the intersection of American history, literature, and political thought from the Revolutionary era to the present. In 2025, he will begin his new role as Assistant Professor of Government (Political Theory) at Dartmouth College.