Winston James

Winston James, who was born in Jamaica and grew up in Jamaica and Britain, earned his doctorate at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. In addition to Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia University Press, 2022) his books include A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (Verso, 2000); The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799-1851 (New York University Press, 2010) and Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (originally published in 1998, second edition, Verso, 2020), winner of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship of the Caribbean Studies Association. In addition to authoring numerous articles and chapters in scholarly journals and books, James is also co-editor of and contributor to the pioneering collection, Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, first published in 1993. He has held teaching positions at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, including Goldsmiths, University of London, Columbia University, where he taught for over a decade, and most recently as professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.