Personal statement

Dr Jesús Sanjurjo FRHistS is a Leverhulme & Chancellor’s Fellow in Atlantic World History at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Before joining Strathclyde, he taught at the universities of Cambridge, Cardiff and York. He obtained his PhD in 2018 at the University of Leeds, supported by an AHRC-WRoCAH PhD scholarship. In November 2022, he was elected as a Councillor and Trustee of the Royal Historical Society. Jesús is a historian of the Atlantic World who specialises in radical politics, race, slavery, carceral systems, and state violence in Spain’s Atlantic Empire ca. 1700-1900. His first book, In the Blood of Our Brothers. Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 (University of Alabama Press, 2021) was a finalist for the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize. In December 2023, Editorial Comares published its Spanish edition. Since then, Jesús has been working on two major research projects: one focused on the political repression unleashed by the colonial authorities in the aftermath of Manuel Lorenzo’s failed revolution in Santiago de Cuba in 1836 (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) and a second project centred on tracking the genesis of systemic racism in the Spanish Empire’s carceral system.