Biography
Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. He is Professor of Humanities and founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London (UCL), and the author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), and Darker Than Blue (2010), in addition to numerous articles, essays, and other critical interventions. Over the course of his career, Gilroy has transformed thinking across disciplines, from Ethnic Studies, British and American Literature, African American Studies, Black British Studies, and Trans-Atlantic History to Critical Race Theory and Post-Colonial theory. He has also contributed to and shaped thinking on Afro-Modernity, aesthetic practices, diasporic poetics and practices, and sound and image worlds. In 2019, Gilroy was awarded the prestigious Holberg Prize, given to a person who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, social science, the law or theology. Gilroy was described by the awarding committee as “one of the most challenging and inventive figures in contemporary scholarship … who remains fearlessly outspoken on matters of race and racism … [and] continues to challenge racialized thinking and to assert the possibilities of alternative models of living together.”