John Kirk, PhD

Dr. John A. Kirk is the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History and director of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He was born and educated in the United Kingdom, where he taught at the University of Wales and the University of London before moving to UA Little Rock in the summer of 2010.
Dr. Kirk’s research focuses on the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, the South, and Arkansas. He has published eight books, five on the civil rights movement in Arkansas, and three on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. He has also written in a wide variety of journals, edited book collections and newspapers and magazines, and he has won a number of prizes and held a number of grants and fellowships in both Europe and in the United States.
His areas of expertise: Civil Rights Movement, African American history, Martin Luther King, Jr., Winthrop Rockefeller, Southern politics, society and culture, Arkansas history.