Dr. Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia. He will be presenting "In the Struggle for the Soul of a Nation, Black History Matters."

Gaines’ scholarship focuses on the problems and projects of racial integration in the United States during and after the civil rights movement. A distinguished scholar in African-American history, he holds appointments in the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies and the Corcoran Department of History. He is author of “Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century” and “American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era”. His current research focuses on the integrationist projects of African American activists, artists and intellectuals, interventions that redefined blackness and acknowledged the relationship of structural and ideological forms of racism to racial capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia.