Brian Kelly (historian)

Brian Kelly is an American historian and a lecturer in US 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 formative struggles around slave emancipation during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed.

Kelly came into academia after extended stints in the construction and shipbuilding industries in Boston, where he was involved in labor and anti-racist activism throughout the 1980s and 1990s. After brief periods working construction in Seattle and New York, he was awarded a Crown Fellowship to pursue postgraduate study in US History at Brandeis University. Awarded his doctorate at Brandeis in 1998 for a dissertation supervised by Jacqueline Jones, Kelly has published widely on race and class in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, including an award-winning study of working-class interracialism in the Birmingham district (Alabama) coal mines. Kelly's Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (University of Illinois Press, 2001, ISBN 0252069331) won five major book awards, including the HL Mitchell Award and the Frances Butler Simkins Prize from the Southern Historical Association and the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for the "best and most innovative work in marxist historiography".

Kelly's Alabama study made three main historiographical contributions. It argued that the re-subordination of black labor that followed the defeat of Reconstruction was a key component of the New South modernization project: progress and reaction went hand-in-hand. Countering the trend in labor history toward the explanatory power of 'whiteness', the study aimed to show that the region's most powerful employers (and not white workers) were the main beneficiaries of Jim Crow, and that the most substantial challenge to racism in early twentieth-century Birmingham came not from liberal elites, but from an interracial working-class movement that held together in the face of energetic attempts to divide them. Finally, Kelly discovered in the Birmingham district an emerging black middle class, deeply influenced by Booker T. Washington's 'industrial accommodationism', that had hitched its influence to anti-union employers.

In a series of articles published after the Alabama study, Kelly attempted to follow up on this latter theme, charting the emergence of intra-racial tensions across the Jim Crow South, including in his "Sentinels for New South Industry," published in Time Longer than Rope (2003), in a chapter in Eric Arnesen's The Black Worker: Race and Labor Activism since Emancipation (2007) and in "No Easy Way Through: Race Leadership and Black Workers at the Nadir" (2010).

Between 2010 and 2015, Kelly 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). In March 2010, the After Slavery Project hosted a Conference on Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South at the College of Charleston,[1] the largest-ever academic conference on the Reconstruction era, with more than 250 participants, including leading scholars Steven Hahn (who gave the keynote) and Eric Foner. Out of this came a co-edited volume, After Slavery: Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, with essays by leading historians in the field, and appraised by Bruce Levine as "an unusually stimulating collection" and "a must-read for scholars working in the field" of Reconstruction.[2]

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 Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and has been involved in teaching exchanges in Brazil and South Africa.

In recent years Kelly's work in US history has straddled three main areas: labor and abolition; black working-class political mobilization during and immediately after the Civil War; and marxist historiography and the history of the American Left. He is particularly interested in the intellectual legacy of WEB Du Bois's magisterial Black Reconstruction in America and, in an extended article on "Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in the United States" [Historical Materialism, 2018] published "the first systematic reappraisal of the scale and dynamics of [Du Bois's notion of the] slaves’ general strike". His current project is an extended monograph on African American labor and political mobilization in black-majority Reconstruction South Carolina, under contract with Verso.

Kelly is active in the local branch of the University and College Union, in local anti-racist and anti-sectarian organizing, and 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 has published on racial tensions between famine-era Irish immigrants and African Americans, 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, and is the author of a widely-read article on the political economy of post conflict Northern Ireland, "Neoliberal Belfast". He has published a number of articles on the controversy about Irish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, including a two-part series in Rebel (reproduced in Counterpunch), and a Platform piece on the subject in History Ireland.