Brian Kelly is Reader in US history at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland),
where he has taught for 25 years, and is former director of the After Slavery Project.
His research and writing focuses on the complicated relationship between race and
class in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, with a concentration on
labor and race in the American South. He has published extensively on topics
ranging from labor abolitionism in the antebellum North to the 1968 Memphis
sanitation strike, in which the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Author
of the prize-winning Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields (Illinois) and
co-editor of After Slavery: Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South
(Florida), Kelly’s research has turned in recent years to the formative struggles which
accompanied slave emancipation. He is completing a book on Black working-class
mobilisation after the Civil War, entitled False Dawn: War and Emancipation in Black-
Majority South Carolina.

Preceding and alongside his academic career, Dr Kelly has been involved over many
years in labor and community organizing. He is a proud member of the University
and College Union (UCU), the union for academic and academic-related staff in the
UK, and is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching excellence and community
engagement. For the academic year 20024-2025, Kelly is PALS Fellow at Birzeit
University in the West Bank in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.