25 Facts About Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy was born on 16 February 1956 and 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.

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

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

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

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

Paul Gilroy is the author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, Small Acts, The Black Atlantic, Between Camps, and After Empire, among other works.

Paul Gilroy was co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain, 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.

Paul 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.

Paul Gilroy 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.

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

Paul 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.

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

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

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

In 2020, Paul Gilroy became the founding director of University College London's Sarah Parker Remond Centre, named in honour of the transatlantic abolitionist and women's rights activist.

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

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

Paul 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.

Paul Gilroy uses the transatlantic slave trade to highlight the influence of "routes" on black identity.

Paul Gilroy uses the image of a ship to represent how authentic black culture is composed of cultural exchanges since the slave trade stifled blacks' ability to connect to a homeland.

Paul Gilroy claims that there was a cultural exchange as well as a commodity exchange that defines the transatlantic slave trade and thus black culture.

Paul Gilroy came to reject outright the working-class movements of the 1970s and '80s on the basis that the system and logic behind the movements were fundamentally flawed as a result of their roots in the way of thinking that not only ignored race but the trans-Atlantic experience as an integral part of the black experience and history.

An additional academic response to Paul Gilroy's work is by scholar Julian Henriques.

In working to understand black culture, Paul Gilroy asks readers to focus on routes of movement of black persons and black cultural production, as opposed to focusing on roots of origin.

However, Henriques argues that Paul Gilroy's focus on routes in themselves is limiting to one's understanding of the black diaspora.