Biography
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 College 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.
Gilroy worked for the Greater London Council for several years during the 1980s before becoming an academic. During that period, he was associated with the weekly listings magazine City Limits and The Wire.
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 held the top position in the humanities rankings in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
Gilroy's theories of race, racism and culture were influential in shaping the cultural and political movement of black British people during the 1990s. Along with people like Lenny Henry, Trevor Nelson, Norman Jay, and Ian Wright he has enabled black British people to declare their commitment and belonging to the United Kingdom.
Gilroy was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of London by Goldsmiths College in September 2005. In Autumn 2009 he served as Treaty of Utrecht Visiting Professor at the Centre for Humanities, Utrecht University.
He is married to the writer and academic Vron Ware. The couple live in North London, and have two children, Marcus and Cora.
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