and Labor Activism since Emancipation (2007) and in "No Easy Way Through: Race Leadership and Black Workers at the Nadir" (2010). Between 2010 and 2015, Kelly directed an international collaborative research project, After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas with project partners Bruce E. Baker (Newcastle) and Susan E. O'Donovan (Memphis). In March 2010, the After Slavery Project hosted a Conference on Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South at the College of Charleston, the largest-ever academic conference on the Reconstruction era, with more than 250 participants, including leading scholars Steven Hahn (who gave the keynote) and Eric Foner. Out of this came a co-edited volume, After Slavery: Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, with essays by leading historians in the field, and appraised by Bruce Levine as "an unusually stimulating collection" and "a must-read for scholars working in the field" of Reconstruction. He has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (NC), the Institute for Southern Studies of the University of South Carolina and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is a faculty affiliate of the Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and has been involved in teaching exchanges in Brazil and South Africa. In recent years Kelly's work in US history has straddled three main areas: labor and abolition; black working-class political mobilization during and immediately after the Civil War; and marxist historiography and the history of the American Left. He is particularly interested in the intellectual legacy of WEB Du Bois's magisterial Black Reconstruction in America and, in an extended article on "Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in the United States" [Historical Materialism, 2018] published "the first systematic reappraisal of the scale and dynamics of [Du Bois's notion of the] slaves’ general strike". His current project is an extended monograph on African American labor and political mobilization in black-majority Reconstruction South Carolina, under contract with Verso. Kelly is active in the local branch of the University and College Union, in local anti-racist and anti-sectarian organizing, and in socialist politics in Belfast, where he is a supporter of People Before Profit, and maintains an interest in contemporary Irish and US politics. He has published on racial tensions between famine-era Irish immigrants and African Americans, wrote the foreword to Seán Mitchell's study of the 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots, Struggle