Dr Owen Walsh

Biography

My academic training began with a BA in English and History and an MA in Race and Resistance, after which I undertook a doctoral project at the University of Leeds. My first book, Frontiers of Black Freedom: Internationalism, Americanism, and Anti-racist Solidarity during the 1930s (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press), draws on this doctoral research. The book focuses on multiracial politics on the US West Coast and on Black Americans' transpacific travel. It demonstrates that these constituted a continuous and distinctive process of anti-racist solidarity making. My book explores how, during the crisis of the Depression era, a radically cosmopolitan Black politics was articulated by a range of figures that have otherwise been marginal to scholarship.

I have since been a LAHRI Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Eccles Centre of the British Library. I took up my present post as Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen in August 2021. My essays on Black and Indigenous radical history have been published in Comparative American Studies, Labor History, Science & Society, and Radical Americas. I am now at work on a second book project, titled Insurgent Americana: Radical US Intellectuals and the Mexican Revolution.

Research Overview

My primary interests are in race, political and cultural radicalism, and internationalism during the twentieth century. My specialism is in US history, though I believe that this is best understood through imperial and global framings.

Frontiers of Black Freedom: Internationalism, Americanism, and Anti-racist Solidarity during the 1930s (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press)

In the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, anti-racism appears as a key dynamic in global politics. This book examines how, in the decade before the Second World War and the framing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, African American activist-intellectuals confronted racial hierarchies at global and local levels by imagining and making alliances that stretched far beyond the transatlantic diaspora. Such efforts form part of the pre-history of later civil rights struggles, and ultimately lay groundwork for the present global resistance to white supremacy.

Frontiers of Black Freedom excavates Black participation in multiracial political cultures on the US West Coast and connects this with the world-spanning travel of figures including the poet Langston Hughes, activist Louise Thompson, travel writer Juanita Harrison, novelist William Attaway, and others. Throughout, the book attends to the ways that anti-racist concerns are necessarily connected to - though not always in harmony with - struggles against capital, patriarchy, empire, and nation. Frontiers of Black Freedom argues that global anti-racist solidarity has been produced historically through cosmopolitan cultural projects, universalist ethical commitments, and internationalist political organising. Drawing on a wide archival base, the book establishes the US West Coast as a globally significant region for anti-racist thought and practice.

Insurgent Americana: Radical US Intellectuals and the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was the first major anti-imperial revolution of the twentieth century, and occurred in a nation that shares a large and porous land border with the US. Yet histories of the American Left have rarely treated the Mexican Revolution as an important rupture or challenge to the thought of US radicals.

This book project interrogates the reception of the Mexican Revolution among the Anglophone US Left, broadly conceived to include Black writers, white cultural diplomats, and political activists with ideological affiliations to communism, anarchism, and socialism. It will examine the ways that ingrained assumptions about race and historical development framed understandings of the Mexican Revolution north of the border, how these assumptions were challenged by it, and what role revolutionary Mexico (beyond its celebrated muralists) played in the US's cultural Left of the interwar period.

Insurgent Americana places the Mexican Revolution squarely at the heart of intellectual and cultural radicalism among Anglophone North Americans.

Other projects

I have written widely on the tradition of Black radicalism at the conjuncture of political theory and literary invention. Most recently, this has taken the form of an essay on Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism in Science & Society. My research interests encompass twentieth-century African American literature, the international history of Marxism, and the global reach of hip-hop.

Knowledge Exchange

I have contributed to a range of Black History Month and other public engagement events, and am eager to bridge scholarship with community and activist work.