Biography

Olly Ayers is a Professor of History of Higher Education, and London Director of the Humanities Center, with research expertise in histories of urban space, race and digital humanities. Along with Professor Nicole Aljoe, he is the Principle Investigator on Mapping Black London – a digital public humanities project that brings together a multigenerational research team from Northeastern’s London and Boston campuses to recentre the Black presence within the long-range history of Britain’s capital city. Mapping Black London was the lead development partner on The London Archives’ 2023 exhibition Unforgotten Lives and is currently engaged in a grant-funded initiative to deploy the project’s digital, place-based, experiential approach to Black history in London schools.

As part of this work, Professor Ayers has authored a number of scholarly publications, including co-editing a new edition of The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho for Oxford World Classics and co-authoring the first biography of Ignatius’ son, William, for Cambridge University Press. His work has been supported the British Academy, the NULab for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and the NU Office of the Provost, and he has published in venues including the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Studies and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. In earlier phases of his career, Professor Ayers examined the US civil rights movement during the Great Depression and Second World War and wrote a monograph, Laboured Protest, which re-examined Black political protest in the first half of the twentieth century.

In 2025, he won Northeastern University’s Global Network Accelerator Award along with Professor K.J. Rawson and Kirsten Saxton, in recognition of their role leading the Humanities Center and re-envisioning its work to grow collaborative, publicly-engaged research and programming across the global university.

Qualifications

PhD in History, University of Kent, Canterbury (2013)

BA in History, University of Manchester (2008)

Research

Dr Ayers’s research centres on themes of race, urban space and digital historical analysis. His first monograph, Laboured Protest, was published by Routledge in 2019 and examined Black civil rights activism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. He has written numerous articles based on racial protest in American cities in the first half of the twentieth century for journals including The Journal of Urban History and The Journal of American Studies.

Dr Ayers also deploys digital methods in his research, a sample of which are showcased at the Digital Cities Research Network site which he directs. Mapping Black London in World War II began in 2020 and uses Geographic Information Systems to explore the often hidden ways in which London shaped, and was shaped by, diverse Black people at a pivotal moment in international history. Another initiative, the History of St Katharine Docks, uses a Story Map to demonstrate the long-range global historical forces that made the area surrounding Northeastern University London’s London campus. Dr Ayers also co-leads a project with Prof Nicole Aljoe on Ignatius Sancho’s London, one of the eighteenth century’s most important Black Britons. Built with a team of undergraduate research assistants, the project recreates Sancho’s world and its connections to the transformative events shaping the life of the nation and the rest of the world in the eighteenth century. These projects have been supported by a Learning and Research Development Initiative Grant, a $50,000 Tier-1 seed fund award, a CSSH Multigenerational Grant, a NULab Seedling Grant and an award from the NEH. Forthcoming work includes a new co-edited edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho for Oxford University Press, a co-authored article looking at networks of slave-ownership among the founders of the St Katharine Docks company and a digital book recovering the long-term Black presence in London before 1950.

Publications

‘Mapping Black London in World War II: A Staged Approach to Digital Spatial History’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2022)

‘Philip A. Payton Jr. and the Making of Harlem Revisited’, New York History, 102:2 (2022): 346-370.

‘Fred Trump, the Ku Klux Klan and Grassroots Redlining in Interwar America’, Journal of Urban History, 47:1 (2021): 3-28

‘Jim Crow and John Bull in London: Transatlantic Encounters with Race and Nation during the Second World War’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 20:3 (2020): 244-266

Laboured Protest: Black Civil Rights in New York City and Detroit during the New Deal and Second World War (New York and London: Routledge, 2019).

‘Black Nationalism and Opposition to Organized Labour in 1930s New York City’, European Journal of American Culture, 34:1 (2015): 5-24

‘The 1935 Labour Dispute at the Amsterdam News and the Challenges Posed by the Rise of Unionism in Depression-Era Harlem’, Journal of American Studies, 48:3 (2014): 797-818

Digital Publications

‘Ignatius Sancho’s London’, online interactive map and digital Story Map, 2022

‘The History of St Katharine Docks’, digital Story Map exhibit, 2021

‘Mapping Black London in World War II’, online interactive map hosted alongside blog content, 2020