Dr Kerry Pimblott

Biography

Kerry Pimblott is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Manchester. A modern U.S. historian by training, she has broad interests in the fields of urban history, labor and working-class history, and African diaspora studies. In both teaching and scholarship, Kerry focuses on social movements for economic and racial justice, drawing upon community-based research methods to examine the relationships between race and class, the state, political economy, and radical activism.

She is the author of Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2017), which was written with the gracious support of the Doris G. Quinn Foundation and the Illinois Historic Preservation Society. Her work has appeared in edited volumes including, The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, edited by Christopher Cantwell, Heath Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake (University of Illinois Press, 2016); The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum (OUP, 2018); and Race, Religion & Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement, edited by Christopher Cameron and Phillip Luke Sinitiere (Vanderbilt, 2021), as well as in journals such as Political Quarterly. Her current research builds on this earlier work focusing on some of Black Power's global dimensions, including the role of activist travel in shaping radical thought and networks; and the distinctive character of Black Power struggles in locales beyond the U.S.

Before joining Manchester, Kerry was an Assistant Professor in African American & Diaspora Studies and History at the University of Wyoming. She completed her B.A. in American Studies at Kings College London in 2005 and her PhD in History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2012. 

Kerry’s research grows out of longstanding involvement in grassroots labor and anti-racist organisations working to challenge state violence and its impact on racialised and working-class communities. She currently serves on the steering committee of the Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP) and as a researcher for Resistance Lab, a Greater Manchester collective against state violence. She is also a founding member of the University of Manchester's Race, Roots & Resistance Collective which is dedicated to critical research and action on race(ism) in the places we live, study and work as well as strengthening pipelines for a new generation of diverse researchers to enter the academy.