Brian Kelly (historian)

Brian Kelly is a U.S.-born historian and a Reader in American History teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His work is concerned mainly with labor and race in the American South, although much of his most recent scholarship focuses on the aftermath of slave emancipation during the Reconstruction Era.
Between 2010 and 2015 he directed an international collaborative research project, "After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas" with project partners Bruce E. Baker (Newcastle) and Susan E. O'Donovan (Memphis). He has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (NC), the Institute for Southern Studies of the University of South Carolina and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is a faculty affiliate of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Awarded his doctorate at Brandeis University for a dissertation supervised by Prof. Jacqueline Jones, Kelly has published widely on race and class in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, including an award-winning book on working-class interracialism in the Birmingham district (Alabama) coal mines, "Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921" (University of Illinois Press, 2001, ) and an extended introduction to the reissue of Bernard Mandel's Old Left classic, Labor, Free and Slave. In March 2010 Kelly and the After Slavery Project hosted the "Conference on Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South" at the College of Charleston, out of which came a co-edited volume (with Bruce E. Baker), After Slavery: Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, with essays by leading historians in the field. An up-to-date list of his publications is available online at academia.edu .
Kelly came into academia after extended stints in the construction and shipbuilding industries, and has been a labor activist over many years. He is active in the University and College Union (UCU) and has served in various roles on the local branch committee at Queen's University Belfast. He is active in socialist politics in Belfast, where he is a prominent supporter of People Before Profit, and maintains an interest in contemporary Irish and US politics. He wrote the foreword to Seán Mitchell's study of the 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots, Struggle or Starve: Working-Class Unity in Belfast 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots.