Dr Ryan Hanley

I am an historian of race and slavery in modern Britain, with particular interests in the contributions and perspectives of people of African descent and the intersection of race and class, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. I have published on black intellectuals, cultures of slavery and abolition, and early examples of racial populism in Britain.

My current research, looks at the relationship between the abolition debates and the emergence of working-class identities in Britain. This follows on from my first two monographs, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press, and Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist, to be published in 2024 by Yale University Press.

I have a particular interest in promoting equity and justice in higher education, and decolonising approaches to pedagogy and research in History. I currently serve as Academic Lead for Student Support (Race Equality and Inclusion) for the Department of History and Archaeology, and have served as Widening Participation Officer and Chair of the Decolonising History working group.

I enjoy communicating my research to the public and my work has been featured in BBC History magazine, The Guardian and The Times. I have been interviewed on BBC World Service, Britain's Most Historic Towns (Channel 4) and The History Workshop Podcast. I welcome media enquiries on any area of my research.

I was awarded my PhD at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull in 2014. I went on to work at the University of Oxford, University College London, and the University of Bristol. I have held visiting fellowships at Queen Mary University London, at the Huntingdon Library in California. I was one of the inaugural Lapidus-OI Fellows at the Omohundro Institute in Virginia in 2014. I joined the University of Exeter in 2019.

In 2015, my article ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw Gronniosaw’, published in the journal Slavery & Abolition, was awarded the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize.

In 2019, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c,1770-1830 was awarded the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize.

In 2021, I gave the prestigious Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at the Hutchins Center for African and African-American History at Harvard University.

In 2023, I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for my work on the history of race, class, and slavery in Britain.

I am interested in supervising research projects in the following areas:

• British slavery and anti-slavery
• Black British history
• "Race" and ethnicity in Britain
• Working-class cultural identity
• Political radicalism and conservatism
• Public history and heritage of Empire and "race"

While my own research interests centre on British social and cultural history in the period c.1750-1850, I am happy to discuss potential projects that fall outside these dates, especially those relating to matters of "race" and racism, Empire and colonialism in the metropole, and decolonising approaches to British history.