Siddhesh Joshi (Editor)

Robin Kelley

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Nationality
  
American

Genre
  
History


Name
  
Robin Kelley

Role
  
Professor

Robin Kelley Zcalo Public Square Robin D G Kelley

Born
  
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley March 14, 1962 (age 62) New York City, New York (
1962-03-14
)

Alma mater
  
California State University, Long Beach; University of California, Los Angeles

Notable works
  
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Spouse
  
Lisa Gay Hamilton (m. 2009)

Education
  
University of California, Los Angeles (1987), California State University, Long Beach

Awards
  
American Book Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada

Books
  
Thelonious Monk: The Life and T, Freedom dreams, Race Rebels: Culture - P, Hammer and hoe, Yo' mama's disfunktional!

Similar People
  
Lisa Gay Hamilton, Franklin Rosemont, Robin Kelly, Vincent Harding

Professor robin kelley the long rise and short decline of american democracy


Robin Davis Gibran Kelley (born March 14, 1962) is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), and from 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University (NYU) as well the chairman of NYU's history department from 2002 to 2003. Robin Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. In the summer of 2000, Dr. Kelley was honored as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught and mentored a class of sophomores, as well as wrote the majority of the book Freedom Dreams. During the academic year 2009–10, Kelley held the Harmsworth Chair of American History at Oxford University, the first African-American historian to do so since the chair was established in 1922. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

Contents

Robin Kelley Shattering the Silences The Case for Minority Faculty

Black lives matter with prof robin kelley


Education

Born in New York City, Robin Kelley earned his Bachelor's degree from California State University, Long Beach, in 1983. By 1987 he had earned his Master's in African history and doctorate in US history from UCLA.

History and background

After earning his doctorate, he began his career as an Assistant Professor at Southeastern Massachusetts University, then to Emory University, and the University of Michigan, where he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. He later moved to the Department of History at New York University, where he was promoted to the rank of Professor and taught courses on U.S. history, African-American history, and popular culture. At the age of 32, he was the youngest full professor at NYU. He is an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

Kelley has spent most of his career exploring American and African-American history, with a particular emphasis on radical social movements and the political dynamics at work within African-American culture, including jazz, hip-hop, and visual arts.

Although influenced by Marxism, Kelley has eschewed a doctrinaire Marxist approach to aesthetics and culture, preferring a modified surrealist approach. He has described himself in the past as a "Marxist surrealist feminist who is not just anti something but pro-emancipation, pro-liberation."

Books

Kelley has published several books focusing upon African-American history and culture as well as race relations, including Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Kelley is also a prolific essayist, having published dozens of articles in scholarly journals, anthologies, and in the popular press, including the Village Voice, Boston Review, and the New York Times.

His book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009), received several honors, including Best Book on Jazz from the Jazz Journalists Association and the Ambassador Award for Book of Special Distinction from the English-Speaking Union. It also received the PEN Open Book Award. The family of Thelonious Monk, notably his son T. S. Monk, granted Kelley access to rare historical documents for his biography. No other scholar has ever had such access and support from the Monk family. Kelley's most recent book, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012), explores the relationship between jazz and Africa in the era of decolonization and Civil Rights. He is currently completing A World to Gain: A History of African Americans, with Earl Lewis and Tera Hunter and a biography of journalist and adventurer Grace Halsell.

Personal life

In August 2009, Kelley married actress Lisa Gay Hamilton.

References

Robin Kelley Wikipedia