Staff Profiles

Semester 2, Spring 2026 Office Hours: Tuesdays 11–1:00; Fridays 4–5:00.

Office: 1.39A Armstrong.

I am a specialist in 20th century US history, particularly focusing on the Black freedom struggle, post-1945 US and Southern history, plus oral and public history. Before moving to Newcastle in January 2010, I directed 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 have more recently published a monograph entitled, Expelled, about civil rights leader James Lawson's ouster from Vanderbilt University in 1960 due to his activism. This account studies his nonviolent witness and the resultant institutional repression against the changing context of legal and social mores at the height of the sit-in movement.

I currently am at work on a monograph drawing from my previous role directing an oral history project on Black lives and urban change in Pittsburgh. This project was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Published work derived from this research has appeared in the Public Historian and Slavery & Abolition, plus the edited volume Black History At the Crossroads: Race and Place in the American City. Subsequent to the oral history project, I also supported the Pittsburgh component of a Mellon Foundation-funded initative about community-based solutions for racial reparations. From this, I co-authoured (with a mix of scholars and community representatives) an output entitled Black Pittsburgh: A New History (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press).

I maintain ongoing interests in oral and public history, as well as the intersections between literature and history. In 2017, I curated an international exhibition, blending historic photographs with oral history excerpts, that took place in Pittsburgh and Newcastle. I served as an international consulting editor for The Public Historian and am currently active in committee work with the Oral History Association and Urban History Association.

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

I have won or been nominated for various teaching awards both in the US and the UK and am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 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.

• 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. "We kept the discussion at an adult level": Jack Kershaw and the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government. Southern Cultures 2014, 20(4).
  • 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. Expelled: James Lawson Jr and Vanderbilt University. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026.
  • Trotter JW, Bush E, Glasco L, Houston B, Mitchell PP, Norman T, Ruck R, Young C. Black Pittsburgh: A New History. University of Michigan Press, 2026. 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.