He studied at City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a degree in History in 1967.
[1] Geary's field of research was the European labour movement and the intellectual history of Marxism.
More recently Dick Geary developed a second research focus on the history of slavery.
During his career Dick Geary worked at King's College, Cambridge and Lancaster University, where he was responsible for the Department of German Studies.
Until his retirement in 2010 he was director of the institute on the History of Slavery at the University of Nottingham.