Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy (born 16 February 1956) is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London (UCL).

Gilroy was born on 16 February 1956 in the East End of London to a Guyanese mother, novelist Beryl Gilroy, and an English father, Patrick, who was a scientist.

He has a sister, Darla.

Gilroy was also co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (1982), a path-breaking, collectively produced volume published under the imprint of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, where he was a doctoral student working with the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall.

Other members of the group include Valerie Amos, Hazel Carby and Pratibha Parmar.

Gilroy taught at South Bank Polytechnic, Essex University, and then for many years at Goldsmiths, University of London, before taking up a tenured post in the US at Yale University, where he was the chair of the Department of African American Studies and Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of Sociology and African American Studies.

He was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at the University of Sussex in 1978.

Gilroy worked for the Greater London Council for several years in the 1980s before becoming an academic.

During that period, he was associated with the weekly listings magazine City Limits (where he was a contributing editor between 1982 and 1984) and The Wire (where he had a regular column from 1988 to 1991).

Other publications for which he wrote during this period include New Musical Express, The New Internationalist and New Statesman and Society.

Gilroy is known as a path-breaking scholar and historian of the music of the black Atlantic diaspora, as a commentator on the politics of race, nation and racism in the UK, and as an archaeologist of the literary and cultural lives of blacks in the western hemisphere.

According to the US Journal of Blacks in Higher Education he has been consistently among the most frequently cited black scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

He moved to Birmingham University, where he completed his PhD in 1986.

Gilroy is a scholar of cultural studies and black Atlantic diasporic culture with interests in the "myriad manifestations of black British culture".

He is the author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987), Small Acts (1993), The Black Atlantic (1993), Between Camps (2000; also published as Against Race in the United States), and After Empire (2004; published as Postcolonial Melancholia in the United States), among other works.

Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness marks a turning point in the study of diasporas.

Applying a cultural studies approach, he provides a study of African intellectual history and its cultural construction.

Moving away from all cultural forms that could be deemed ethnic absolutism, Gilroy offers the concept of the black Atlantic as a space of transnational cultural construction.

In his book, Gilroy makes the peoples who suffered from the Atlantic slave trade the emblem of his new concept of diasporic peoples.

This new concept breaks with the traditional diasporic model based on the idea that diasporic people are separated by a communal source or origin, offering a second model that privileges hybridity.

Gilroy's theme of double consciousness involves black Atlantic striving to be both European and black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency being absolutely transformed.

Rather than encapsulating the African-American tradition within national borders, Gilroy recognizes the actual significance of European and African travels of many African-American writers.

To prove his point, he re-reads the works of African-American intellectuals against the background of a trans-Atlantic context.

Gilroy's concept of the black Atlantic fundamentally disrupts contemporary forms of cultural nationalism and reopens the field of African-American studies by enlarging the field's interpretive framework.

Gilroy offers a corrective to traditional notions of culture as rooted in a particular nation or history, suggesting instead an analytic that foregrounds movement and exchange.

In an effort to disabuse scholars of cultural studies and cultural historians in the UK and the US from assuming a "pure" racial, ethnic, and class-based politics/political history, Gilroy traces two legacies of political and cultural thought that emerge through cross-pollination.

Gilroy critiques New Leftists for assuming a purely nationalist identity that in fact was influenced by various black histories and modes of exchange.

Gilroy's initial claim seeks to trouble the assumptive logics of a "pure" western history (canon), offering instead a way to think these histories as mutually constituted and always already entangled.

He held the top position in the humanities rankings in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008.

In Autumn 2009 he served as Treaty of Utrecht Visiting Professor at the Centre for Humanities, Utrecht University.

He was the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics before he joined King's College London in September 2012.

Gilroy was awarded a 50th Anniversary Fellowship of Sussex University in 2012.

In 2014 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

In the same year, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Gilroy holds honorary doctorates from the Goldsmiths University of London, the University of Liège 2016, the University of Sussex, and the University of Copenhagen.

He was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in April 2018.

Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".

In 2020, Gilroy became the founding director of University College London's Sarah Parker Remond Centre (formerly the Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation), named in honour of the transatlantic abolitionist and women's rights activist.

Gilroy is married to writer, photographer and academic Vron Ware.

The couple live in north London, and have two children, Marcus and Cora.