John Munro

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2019. I have previously taught in the History Department at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, and have held fellowships at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and, through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, at the American Studies Institute at the University of Rostock.

I have published articles and book chapters on the knowledge production of social movements, the intersectional aspects of US empire, as well as race and US imperial culture. My first book, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Movement and Global Decolonization, 1945-1960, which was a finalist for the African American Intellectual History Society’s 2018 Pauli Murray Prize, took up the topics of anticommunism, the continuities of colonialism, the intricacies of popular front politics, and the limitations of liberalism.

More recently, I am editor of a forthcoming collection of essays entitled Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944, which ranges across history, literature, film, and philosophy to consider a diverse array of texts that were produced within one fateful year and which sought to shape the postwar order. I am also working on a new project that examines the consolidation of the idea of US empire amid the decline of the idea of the cold war.