Jake Subryan Richards

Biography

Jake Subryan Richards, assistant professor of history at the London School of Economics, is a historian, curator, and writer. His interests lie in the Atlantic world and global history, with interests in legal history, the history of empires, and the African diaspora. His first book, The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025), provides a new history of slave-trade suppression. The book tells the story of people “liberated” from slaving ships by maritime patrols and then forced into bonded labour by various empires. These men and women navigated anti-slave-trade laws that both subjected them to authoritarian control and provided a domain for them to create their own visions of freedom. The Times Literary Supplement named Bonds of Freedom one of its Books of the Year in 2025. 

Richards’s interests in historical methods and storytelling run through his teaching and public work: he cocurated the exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2023–24), which won the Association for Art History Curatorial Prize for Exhibitions. BBC Radio, the Financial Times, and El País have covered his research. He has also written for History Today and Project Syndicate.

Richards is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.