From 1996 to 1997, Gaines served as a
National Humanities Center fellow, during which time he published several essays as well as a
monograph entitled "African American Expatriates in Nkrumah's Ghana, 1957–1966." From 1997 to 1999, Gaines was an associate professor of history and African American studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. In 1997, Gaines was awarded the
John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the
American Studies Association (ASA) for his book
Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, which had originally been written as his graduate dissertation. From 2005 to 2010, he was the director of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the
University of Michigan. From 2015 to 2018, Gaines taught at
Cornell University as the
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Africana Studies and History. He was additionally a member of the Public Voices Fellowship program, a campaign designed to share the work of underrepresented thinkers in academia. Through this fellowship, he published an
op-ed in
Ebony regarding race relations and
student protests on college campuses. In 2018, Gaines joined the University of Virginia as the college's first Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice. While there, he was selected to be part of a renaming committee, dedicated to the discussion and potential renaming of various UVA buildings and memorials that had been named for Confederates, eugenicists, and similar figures. In 2020, Gaines testified as an expert witness regarding the removal of a
statue of
Confederate States General
Robert E. Lee in
Richmond, Virginia, arguing instead for the establishment of a memorial to
enslaved people in its place. ==Writings==