• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 5370
• Email: gdgl1@le.ac.uk
• Office: Attenborough 616
• Office Hours: 2011/12 on research leave
• Website: Centre for American Studies

Biography

I received my PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where I also taught briefly before taking up an academic post at the University of Nottingham. I joined the University of Leicester's Centre for American Studies and School of Historical Studies in 2002, and have been Director of CAS since 2009. I have been a visiting research student at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia, and a Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. Major grant successes include the AHRC's Research Leave scheme, in support of a project on Massive Resistance, and the British Academy's Research Development Award, for a project on Un-Americans and Un-Americanism. I have long maintained strong links with the British Association of American Studies (BAAS): having delivered my first academic paper at a BAAS conference in 1997, I successfully stood for election to the association's Executive ten years later, and was re-elected in 2010. I now serve as Chair of the BAAS Publications Sub-committee. 

Research

PhD Supervision

My primary areas of supervision expertise are: US race relations and southern politics; the civil rights movement, white supremacy and resistance, and the “new conservatism.” The Leicester University library now has an impressive array of primary source material to support research into such areas, including the 18 reels of microfilm that make up the NAACP Papers (Part 20) White Resistance and Reprisals, 1956-1965, a microfilm collection of The FBI Files on Malcolm X, and the published Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Teaching

My undergraduate teaching is centred on the history of the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including race relations, civil rights, and the domestic Cold War. I have supervised undergraduate dissertations on a wide variety of topics, including particular aspects of the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., the political activism of particular Native American tribes, the ideology and function of the White Citizens’ Councils, and a comparison of the cultural impact of Motown and Stax Records.

My postgraduate teaching includes a module on White Supremacy: Rhetoric and Reality in the USA which uses a mixture of primary and secondary material to analyse common themes, trends and emerging differences in the ideology and practice of white supremacy in the USA, c.1830-1990.

I was conference secretary for the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Conference , which was held here in Leicester in April 2007, and am an elected member of the BAAS Executive Committee (2007 – 2010).

Administrative Responsibilities

Director of the Centre for American Studies

Member of College Management Board
Member of Senate

Most Recent Publications

1. "Barack Hussein Obama: the Use of History in the Creation of an ‘American’ President,"  Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 45, Nos. 1-2 (2011): 43-61.
2. Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hodder, 2006)  ISBN: 978-0-340-90022-2, pp. i-viii, 1-254.
3. “Virginia’s Northern Strategy: Southern Segregationists and the Route to National  Conservatism,” Journal of Southern History, LXXII, 1 (February 2006), pp. 111-146.
4. The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anti-Communism and Massive Resistance,  1945-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). ISBN 0-8130-2753-5, pp. i-x,  1-228.