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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Richard Huzzey

Professor (Modern British History)

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor (Modern British History) in the Department of History+44 (0) 191 33 41063

Biography

My principal research and teaching interests lie in modern British history, especially popular politics, social movements, and associational culture. I am currently researching a new history of abolitionism. I am also collaborating in a series of research projects examining petitioning and popular politics over the past 250 years or so.

I led the AHRC-ESRC Reseach Project 'Petitions and People Power in Twentieth-Century Britain' alongside Anna Bocking-Welch (Liverpool), Cristina Leston-Bandeira (Leeds), and Henry Miller (Durham). In addition to a scholarly monograph under contract with OUP, we created new oral history recordings with our partners at the British Library and the History of Parliament Trust, and we've shared findings with staff or legislators from the House of Commons, Scottish Parliament, Senedd, Northern Ireland Assembly, and Parliament of Lower Saxony, amongst others. We published a report with the Hansard Society and discussed our findings in their podcast. I pop up in places like BBC and commercial radio from time-to-time when there's a big e-petition and journalists want to know whether petitions ever change anything in history.

From 2016-19, Henry Miller and I led a research project on 'Re-thinking petitions, Parliament, and people in the long nineteenth century', which was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust. We analysed records of 1 million public petitions to the House of Commons in the period 1780-1918 - and also considered petitioning to other bodies of authority. Our project offered unprecedent scrutiny of this phenomenon by looking at the totality - and variety - of petitions to MPs from men and women, humble or haughty, across Britain and the British Empire. We are now publishing the research, starting with a 2020 Past and Present article (open acess). We connected with a growing number of scholars examining petitions from other times and places through our our AHRC Research Network on petitioning that produce this volume for the Proceedings of the British Academy.

I have previously examined the descent of British anti-slavery politics after emancipation, charting the ways in which abolitionist ideas thrived in Victorian Britain and encouraged new vectors of imperial expansion. I co-edited a volume on The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Manchester University Press, 2015), and my first book was Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Cornell University Press, 2012).

I was a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and led the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers and the International Slavery Museum. Before that, I held a lectureship at Plymouth University and a post-doctoral research fellowship at Yale 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.

Research Supervision

Durham offers fantastic resources for research into modern British and imperial history. I welcome inquiries from potential postgraduate research students, especially where your interests touch on political culture, social movements, or slavery and abolition.

I have had the pleasure to act as primary supervisor supervise the doctoral research of the following graduates:

  • Dr. Margaret Armstrong (PhD student, 2017 - 2021, "Medical provision under the New Poor Law in County Durham")
  • Dr. Nick Bubak (PhD, University of Liverpool, 2012 - 2016, "Hyper-Citizenship and the Experience of Youth in the Edwardian Scouting Movement")
  • Daniel Doherty (Part-time PhD student, 2019 - 2025 , "Racial violence and anti-abolitionist violence in the antebellum United States"
  • Dr. Joe Kelly (ESRC CASE PhD, University of Liverpool, 2014 - 2017, "Supply Chains and Moral Responsibility: Slavery and Capitalism after British Emancipation"), in collaboration with National Museums Liverpool
  • Dr. Carrie Long (AHRC CDP student, 2018 - 2023), "The social agency of petitioning, c. 1789-1860"), in collaboration with the National Archives and National Maritime Museum
  • Dr. Mark Markov (DDS PhD student, 2019 - 2023), "International navies in national waters during the American Civil War"
  • Dr. Joe Mulhern (AHRC CDP student, 2014 - 2018, "After 1833: British entanglement in Brazilian Slavery, c. 1840-1888"), in collaboration with the British Library
  • Dr. Jim Powell (Part-time PhD, University of Liverpool, 2014 - 2018, "King Cotton in Exile: The American Civil War and British Raw Cotton")
  • Dr. Ciara Stewart (Leverhulme Research Project student, Durham University, 2016 - 2020, "Irish Women's Petitions to the House of Commons")
Professional Membership
  • Fellow, Royal Historical Society
  • Member, Historical Association
  • Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy
  • Member, Study of Parliament Group

Research interests

  • Modern Britain and the British Empire
  • Popular Politics and Social Movements
  • Slavery and Abolition
  • Petitions in the United Kingdom, c. 1780-1918

Esteem Indicators

  • 2013: Whitfield Prize, proxime accessit: Royal Historical Society
  • 2011: Alexander Prize: Royal Historical Society

Publications

Authored book

Book review

Chapter in book

  • Petitions and Petitioning in Historical Perspective
    Huzzey, R., Janse, M., Miller, H., Oddens, J., & Waddell, B. (2024). Petitions and Petitioning in Historical Perspective. In R. Huzzey, M. Janse, H. Miller, J. Oddens, & B. Waddell (Eds.), Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present (pp. 1-30). OUP for the British Academy. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197267721.003.0001
  • Petitioning and People Power in Twentieth-Century Britain
    Bocking-Welch, A., Huzzey, R., Leston-Bandeira, C., & Miller, H. (2022). Petitioning and People Power in Twentieth-Century Britain. In M. Mair, R. Meckin, & M. Elliot (Eds.), Investigative Methods: An NCRM Innovation Collection (pp. 75-86). ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.5258/ncrm/ncrm.00004550
  • From Estate under Pressure to Spiritual Pressure Group: The Bishops and Parliament
    Taylor, S., & Huzzey, R. (2018). From Estate under Pressure to Spiritual Pressure Group: The Bishops and Parliament. In R. Huzzey (Ed.), Pressure and Parliament: From Civil War to Civil Society. (pp. 89-101). Wiley.
  • Contesting Interests: Rethinking Pressure, Parliament, Nation, and Empire
    Huzzey, R. (2018). Contesting Interests: Rethinking Pressure, Parliament, Nation, and Empire. In R. Huzzey (Ed.), Pressure and Parliament: From Civil War to Civil Society. (pp. 1-17). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12326
  • Manifest Dominion: The British Empire and the Crises of the Americas in the 1860s.
    Huzzey, R. (2017). Manifest Dominion: The British Empire and the Crises of the Americas in the 1860s. In D. H. Doyle (Ed.), American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s. (pp. 82-106). University of North Carolina Press. https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631097.003.0005
  • History, memory, and commemoration of Atlantic slave-trade suppression.
    Huzzey, R., & McAleer, J. (2015). History, memory, and commemoration of Atlantic slave-trade suppression. In R. Burroughs & R. Huzzey (Eds.), The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade: British policies, practices and representations of naval coercion. (pp. 166-187). Manchester University Press.
  • The politics of slave trade suppression
    Huzzey, R. (2015). The politics of slave trade suppression. In R. Burroughs & R. Huzzey (Eds.), The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade: British policies, practices and representations of naval coercion. (pp. 17-52). Manchester University Press.
  • Concepts of liberty: Freedom, laissez faire and the state after Britain’s abolition of slavery.
    Huzzey, R. (2014). Concepts of liberty: Freedom, laissez faire and the state after Britain’s abolition of slavery. In C. Hall, N. Draper, & K. McClelland (Eds.), Emancipation and the Re-making of the British Imperial World. (pp. 149-171). Manchester University Press.
  • British Liberties, American Slavery, and the Democracy of Race
    Huzzey, R. (2013). British Liberties, American Slavery, and the Democracy of Race. In E. Dzelzainis & R. Livesey (Eds.), The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 (pp. 121-134). Ashgate Publishing.
  • Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
    Huzzey, R. (2012). Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. In R. C. Windscheffel, R. Quinault, & R. Swift (Eds.), William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives. (pp. 253-266). Ashgate Publishing.
  • The Evolution of Petitioning in Europe and North America, 1850-2000
    Huzzey, R., & Miller, H. (n.d.). The Evolution of Petitioning in Europe and North America, 1850-2000. In R. Huzzey, M. Janse, H. Miller, J. Oddens, & B. Waddell (Eds.), Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present [Contracted by publisher] (pp. 194-215). Oxford University Press for the British Academy.

Edited book

Journal Article

Supervision students

Dan Doherty

Anti-Abolitionist Violence in the Antebellum North, 1840-1845

Lucy Jameson

Disabled Innovation and the British Post Office

Michaela Cardo

Gifted Lives: Dress Object Gifts and British Cultural Life, 1830-1870

Sophie Bellamy

Northern Bridge CDA with Tyne & Wear Archives: The Growth and Decline of North East Jewish Communities, 1881-2000