Staff Profiles

Ben researches and teaches 20th century US history, with a particular focus on the African American freedom struggle and post-1945 US and Southern history, plus oral and public history.

Before moving to Newcastle in January 2010, he served as director of the Remembering African American Pittsburgh (RAP) oral history project, sponsored by the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University.

I am a scholar of race relations in modern US history. My first book, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City, was a community study of race relations and the Movement in Nashville, Tennessee. It focused on the evolving relationship between racial law and racial custom (as exhibited by a number of different settings within the city) and how this relationship conditioned the cultural attitudes of whites and African Americans. The book was awarded the Tennessee History Book Award (from the Tennessee Historical Commission & Tennessee Library Association) and the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize (from the British Association of American Studies and the University of East Anglia). 

I also maintain ongoing interests in oral and public history, as well as the intersections between literature and history. My next monograph will draw from the oral histories collected during my tenure as director of the Remembering African American Pittsburgh (RAP) oral history project, and was supported with a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. I curated an international exhibition that blended historic photographs with oral history excerpts from RAP that ran in two cities in 2017. I also served as an international consulting editor for The Public Historian. I am also engaged on research on the 1960 sit-ins and African American authors of the late 20th century.

I welcome enquiries from prospective research students interested in modern US and African American history. 

I have taught variously at all stages on the 1960s in US history, the long black freedom struggle, oral history theory, methodology, and practicalities, historical skills, and more.

For Semester 1 (2023), I am teaching:

--HIS3240: The Civil Rights Movement

--HIS3000: Reading History

--HIS2316: Researching History

--HIS2219: Oral History & Memory.

Office Hours are: Tuesdays (2--3:30) and Fridays (2--3:30).

Office: 1.39A Armstrong.

• Articles

  • Hunt M, Houston B, Ward B, Megoran N. “He was shot because America will not give up on racism”: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the African American civil rights movement in British schools. Journal of American Studies 2021, 55(2), 387-417.
  • Houston B. Rhythm, Colour, and Movements: Narratives of Art and Life in Black Pittsburgh. Slavery & Abolition 2020, 41(1), 64-78.
  • Houston B. Not as It Is Written: Blending Oral Histories and Historic Photographs in a Civil Rights Exhibition. Public Historian 2020, 42(2), 78-100.
  • Houston B. "The Aquinas of the Rednecks": reconciliation, the southern character, and the bootleg ministry of Will D. Campbell. The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2011, 4(2), 135-150.
  • Houston B. A Conversation with Will D. Campbell. Journal of Southern Religion 2007, 10, -.
  • Houston B. Voice of the Exploited Majority: Claude Kirk and the 1970 Manatee County Forced Busing Incident. Florida Historical Quarterly 2005, 83(3), 258-286.

• Authored Books

  • Houston B. The Lawson Affair: Race, Power and Protest at a Southern University. Vanderbilt University Press, 2025. In Preparation.
  • Houston B. The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City. Georgia, USA: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

• Book Chapters

  • Houston B. Race in the Rust Belt: Black Pittsburgh and Narratives of Racial Change. In: Leslie M. Harris; Clarence Lang; Rhonda Williams, and Joe William Trotter Jr, ed. Black Urban History at the Crossroads: Race and Place in the American City. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024, pp.209-223.
  • Houston B. Before The Bridge: Grassroots Activism in Selma in the Early 1960s. In: Street J; Lozano HK, ed. The Shadow of Selma. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2018, pp.37-57.
  • Houston B. Donald Davidson and the Segregationist Intellect. In: Kilbride, D.; Frank, L.T, ed. Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2011, pp.160-177.