Paul Gilroy (born 16 February 1956) is a Professor at the London School of Economics.

Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents (his mother was novelist Beryl Gilroy), he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. He moved to Birmingham University where he completed his PhD in 1986. Gilroy is a scholar of Cultural Studies and Black Atlantic diasporic culture with interests in the "myriad manifestations of black British culture." He is the author of Ain't no Black in the Union Jack (1987), Small Acts (1993), The Black Atlantic (1993), Between Camps (2000) (also published as "Against Race" in the United States), and "After Empire" (2004) (published as Postcolonial Melancholia in the United States), among other works. Gilroy was also co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: race and racism in 1970s Britain (1982), a path-breaking, collectively produced volume published under the imprint of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University where he was a doctoral student working with the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall. Other members of the group which produced that volume included Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar.