Robin D. G. Kelley

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley was born on March 12, 1962 in New York City, New York to Ananda Suttwa and Donald Sheralton Kelley. He received his B.A. degree in history from California State University, Long Beach and his Ph.D. degree in U.S. history from the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1988, Kelley was an assistant professor of history and African American studies at Emory University. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1990 and was later hired as a professor of history and Africana studies at New York University, where he became the school’s youngest full professor. In 2002, he was named chair of New York University’s history department. The following year, Kelley joined Columbia University in New York City, New York as a professor of anthropology and African American studies; and, in 2005, he was appointed acting director of the Cener for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. In 2006, he began teaching as a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 2011, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a distinguished professor of history and African American studies, holding the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History. Kelley received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and became the chair of UCLA’s Department of African American Studies in 2017.

Kelley also held visiting appointments at the University of Melbourne in Australia; Columbia University; the Lincoln Center at the University of Oxford, England; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Stanford University in Palo Alto, California; and the Hokkaido Summer Institute in Sapporo, Japan. He served as a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and as the Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence at Brooklyn College in New York.

In 1990, Kelley published his first book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. He released Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class in 1994, followed by Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 in 1996 and Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America in 1997. Kelley co-authored We Changed the World: African Americans, 1945–1970 with Vincent Harding and Earl Lewis, and in 2001, he collaborated with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank on Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century. He published Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination in 2002; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original in 2009; and Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times in 2012. Several of his books have been translated into Japanese.

Kelley received the Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Freedom Scholars Award from the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

He and his wife, LisaGay Hamilton, reside in Beverly Hills, California.

Robin D.G. Kelley was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on March 20, 2023.