Robin D.G. Kelley

Robin Kelley is both a wunderkind of the academy as well as a much-loved public intellectual. He is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and recently completed a year-long visiting professorship as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. His writing regularly appears in The Nation, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, US News and World Report, Utne Reader, The Root, Monthly Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, Boston Review, and Huffington Post to name a few.

He is the author of many prize-winning books including Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class, and Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (selected as a Village Voice top ten book), He also edited (with Earl Lewis), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection. And his articles such as “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked,” receive over one million hits. He is currently at work on The Education of Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.

Besides the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford, Robin has been a visiting scholar of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Louis Armstrong Professor of Jazz Studies at Columbia University, and delivered the prestigious Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard, which were published last year as Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times. Among the many honors and awards he has received are the PEN Open Book Award, the Jazz Journalist Association Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Outstanding Book in Human Rights Award from the Gustavus Myers Center at the Society of American Historians (twice), the ABC CLIO Award for Best Scholarly Article, the Elliot Rudwick Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and the Francis Butler Simkins Prize from the Southern Historical Association.