Jake Subryan Richards

Dr Jake Subryan Richards is assistant professor of history in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. Between 2020 and 2024, he is the lead researcher and external curator of a project to investigate how the collections of the University of Cambridge Museums are connected to Atlantic enslavement and empire. Richards’s interests span Dutch and British fine art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the art of the African diaspora over the past five hundred years. He is particularly interested in how artists and activists have established, challenged, and overturned visual norms related to slavery and freedom. Richards has published research in Past and Present and Comparative Studies in Society and History. His article on anti-slave-trade law won the 2019 Alexander Prize and his PhD thesis was co-winner of the 2021 Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal. Richards is a co-convenor of the research network Slavery and Freedom: Material and Visual Histories at the University of Cambridge’s interdisciplinary CRASSH centre. He is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.