Richard Huzzey

Thank you for visiting my webpage. On the menu to the right there are a variety of pages that provide information about my interests and work.

I joined the Department of History at the Durham University in the summer of 2016. Here, I am working with a team of researchers on ‘Parliament, Petitions and People in the long nineteenth century’, generously funded by a Research Project Grant (RPG-2016-097) from the Leverhulme Trust.

Previously, I lectured at the University of Liverpool and led the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, a partnership between that university and the International Slavery Museum.

From 2008-2010, I taught and undertook research as a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in History at Yale University, before spending two years as a lecturer at Plymouth University. I researched my doctorate at St. Catherine’s and St. Anne’s colleges, University of Oxford, and studied for my BA and Master’s degrees at St. Anne’s. My DPhil thesis examined British anti-slavery politics after West Indian emancipation.

Since then my work on anti-slavery has expanded backwards and forwards in time but retained a strong interest in Britain’s relationship with world slavery and abolition. My first book, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, was published by Cornell University Press in September 2012. I have co-edited a new history of the Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade: British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion which was published by Manchester University Press in 2015.

My current research interests include: popular ideas about political representation, particularly regarding petitioning; anti-slavery in the period of abolition and emancipation (c. 1776-1838); and understandings of the relationship between material interest and moral principle in history. I am now writing a new history of British abolitionism.