Whether he’s writing about John Smith or John C. Calhoun, about the Union’s siege of Charleston in the Civil War or the shipwrecked birth of America, Joseph Kelly looks for the human story, fully painting the figures who make history happen. Always he aims to write about complex ideas and history in lively, readable prose. His interests range from the obscenity trial of James Joyce’s Ulysses to U. S. Southern history. His new book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 (Bloomsbury, July 2026), traces how American fascism originated in the antebellum South through slavery denial, evolved through Jim Crow, and emerged as Anglo-Saxon nationalism promoting a master-race ideology. It’s described by historian Greg Grandin as “a sweeping and much-needed work of history.”
In addition to several critical and biographical articles on James Joyce, Kelly’s first book, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon, uses extensive archival research to uncover the manipulations of this monumental figure of modern literature by liberals and conservatives in the American culture wars. His popular introductory books on short stories, poems, essays, and plays, W. W. Norton & Company’s Seagull Readers, have sold well over 100,000 copies and are entering their 4th edition. America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March toward Civil War (Overlook Press/Abrams), “brings a literary sensibility to the craft of history writing,” according to the eminent Lincoln scholar, Orville Vernon Burton. Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck and the Epic Story of the First Americans was published by Bloomsbury Press in Fall 2018, chronicling the maroons, mutineers and pirates who pioneered the idea of America.
Kelly earned his Ph. D. in literature with a minor in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. Since then, he has been teaching a variety of courses at the College of Charleston, most recently Irish nationalism and culture, urban geography, and composition. He is the Co-Director of the College of Charleston’s Commission on Diversity, a Faculty Administrative Fellow in the President’s office, and a recent recipient of the Charleston’s Distinguished Service Award and Leo I. Higden Outstanding Leadership Award.