Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia. He received his BA degree from Harvard University and his PhD degree from Brown University in the Department of American Civilization. He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin book prize of the American Studies Association. His book American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006) was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. 

Gaines is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009-10). While at the University of Michigan, he was the director of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies from 2005-2010.  

From 1987 to 1991, he was jazz director at WBRU-FM in Providence, Rhode Island and on-air host of jazz, blues, and reggae programs. He was a member of the advisory board of the Detroit Jazz Festival from 2012 to 2018.

Gaines is currently working on three books: one entitled The African American Journey: A Global History (forthcoming, Oxford University Press); an intellectual biography of the African American social science scholar and activist St. Clair Drake; and the third, tentatively titled, Problems and Projects of Integration. His essays, columns, and reviews on African American history, art, music, literature, and culture have been published in major newspapers, journals, and magazines, including The New York Times, Ebony, Truthout, American Quarterly, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, American Literary History, Small Axe, and Radical History Review. He has lectured at universities throughout the U.S. as well as internationally in Japan, Korea, England, France, Ghana, South Africa, and Australia.