Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (November 2015)
Born	(1956-02-16) February 16, 1956 (age 61) London, England, United Kingdom
Alma mater	University College School Sussex University Birmingham University
Occupation	Professor, writer
Parent(s)	Beryl Gilroy

Paul Gilroy (born 16 February 1956) is a Professor of American and English Literature at King's College London.

Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents (his mother was novelist Beryl Gilroy), he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. 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 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 which produced that volume included Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar.

Gilroy taught at South Bank University, Essex University, and then Goldsmiths, University of London for many years before leaving London to take up a tenured post 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 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.