Bob Graham Center for Public Service

Kevin Bird, Ph.D., serves as the Center's Experiential Learning Coordinator and Lecturer. He works with students selected for the Gainesville City Government, Tallahassee Internship and Washington Internship programs. Dr. Bird has guided students’ experiential learning as a part of his advising and student support in UF's Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and the Warrington Professional MBA programs. He has also taught for multiple departments at Santa Fe College and UF.

Dr. Bird has a doctorate in history from UF with a focus on the American South. He also holds master's and bachelor’s in history from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a master’s in religion from Abilene Christian University's Graduate School of Theology.

His teaching and research interests include agricultural and industrial developments such as sharecroppers’ and railroad workers’ struggle to uphold the value and dignity of their labor and agrarian and industrial-based labor violence. He demonstrates the relevance of agrarian and labor struggles to the origins and development of broad-based grassroots organizing approaches that prioritized enfranchising entire communities.

In particular, he tracks community-based struggles from Reconstruction to the late 20th century to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty,” as set forth in the U.S. Constitution. African Americans led the pursuit for these ideals beginning in the 1860s in the deep southern contexts in which Dr. Bird grew up, southwest Mississippi and southeast Louisiana. What Dr. Bird has termed as the McComb Organizing Model (MCOM) became the dominant methodology used by African Americans and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers in what developed into the largest expansion of democracy in the history of the United States.