A native of Ohio, Hardesty graduated from Ohio Northern University in 2008 and received his PhD from Boston College in 2014. His work has been published in a number of different venues, including scholarly journals and online where he is a blogger for the African American Intellectual History Society (aaihs.org). He is the author of Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston, published by New York University Press as part of the Early American Places initiative in 2016. He lives in Bellingham, WA with his wife Dana and dog Georgia.