Email: rmjelks (at symbol) ku.edu
Doctor Randal Jelks is an Associate Professor of American Studies with a joint appointment in African and African American Studies.
Ph.D., Michigan State
Professor Jelks' childhood home is New Orleans. He lived there until he was fourteen, whereupon he resided in Chicago until college. Although Jelks has lived in the North numerous years, he considers New Orleans to be his home.
Jelks is a graduate of South Shore High School (Chicago), the University of Michigan (BA in History), McCormick Theological Seminary (Masters of Divinity) and Michigan State University (Ph.D. in History). He is also an ordained clergy person in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Before joining the faculty of the University of Kansas, Professor Jelks taught at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Dr. Jelks was the 2006-2007 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Park Triangle, North Carolina and in 2008 he was the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas in American Studies.
Jelks has published both scholarly and journalistic articles. His research and writing interests are in the area of African American Religious, Urban, and Civil Rights History. Jelks most recent article is titled "Obama, Wright, and Trinity" for the Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame. He has also published an award winning book titled African Americans in the Furniture City: the Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan (The University of Illinois Press, 2006). He is currently finishing a book on Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentor titled Benjamin Elijah Mays,: A Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South: An Intellectual Biography to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.
