Robin D. G. Kelley

Robin Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History UCLA. His research has explored the history of social movements in the US, the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music and visual culture; Surrealism, Marxism, among other things. His essays have appeared in a wide variety of professional journals as well as general publications, including the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, Color Lines, Souls, The Black Scholar, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.

His books include, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century; Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

He is also co-editor of the following books: Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (with Jesse Benjamin); The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (with Stephen Tuck); Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (with Franklin Rosemont); To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis); Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (with Sidney J. Lemelle); and the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (1995-1998).

Kelley is currently completing three book projects, including Black Bodies Swinging: An American Postmortem which is a genealogy of the Black Spring protests of 2020 by way of a deep examination of state-sanctioned racialized violence and a history of resistance. The blood at the root is “racial capitalism.” But Black Bodies Swinging is also a history of resistance, arguing that the new abolitionists represent the “Third Reconstruction generation.” Kelley is also completing a biography of the late Grace Halsell, tentatively titled The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century, as well as collaborating with Professor Tera Hunter on a general survey of African American history.