Brian Kelly

Who is Brian Kelly?

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.

He directs an international collaborative research project, After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas. He is a fellow of the Institute for Southern Studies of the University of South Carolina and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Awarded his doctorate at Brandeis University, 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 Alabama mines, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 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 in South Carolina.