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Dr Richard Smith

Richard explores media representations of black and Asian troops within multicultural memory and commemoration processes.

Staff details

Teaching

  • MC52014B Media, Modernity and Social Thought
  • MC52063A Media, Memory and Conflict
  • MC53001B Personal Tutored Research (coordinator)

Publications and research outputs

Book

  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2004. Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719069858

Book Section

  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2024. West Indian Soldiers and the Mediated, Imagined Landscapes of the First World War. In: Mandy Link and Matthew M. Stith, eds. New Perspectives on the First World War: Beyond No Man's Land. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39-54. ISBN 9783031493249
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2021. ‘The YMCA and West Indian Pan-African encounters during the First World War: The Drury Lane club for “Coloured Sailors and Soldiers”’. In: Santanu Das; Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach, eds. Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict, 1914-1918. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 190-213. ISBN 9781138082106
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2020. Colonial Soldiers: Race, Military Service and Masculinity during and beyond World War I and II. In: Karen Hagemann; Stefan Dudink and Sonya Rose, eds. Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199948710

Article

  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2025. Review of David Lambert, Soldiers of Uncertain Rank: The West India Regiments in British Imperial Culture. Slavery and Abolition, 46(4), pp. 921-922. ISSN 0144-039X
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2024. World War II Camps in Jamaica: Evacuees, Refugees, Internees, Prisoners of War, by Suzanne Francis-Brown [review article]. New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 98(3-4), pp. 415-416. ISSN 1382-2373
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2023. Hongkongers in the British Armed Forces, 1860-1997/Lured by the American Dream: Filipino Servants in the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, 1952-1970 [review article]. Journal of Military History, 87(4), pp. 1127-1130. ISSN 0899-3718

Conference or Workshop Item

  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2021. 'The Manchester Guardian, Pan Africanism and Anti-colonial Struggle: the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, 1935-1937'. In: Liberalism Inc: 200 years of the Guardian. ӣƵ, United Kingdom 23 - 24 April 2021.
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2020. 'Remembering Jamaica's role in the First World War: from empire to multicultural remembrance'. In: Friends of the Georgian Society of Jamaica monthly talk. Online Event, United Kingdom 24 November 2020.
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2020. 'Remembering the role of the West Indies in the First World War: from empire to multicultural remembrance'. In: Black History Month lunchtime talks. Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, United Kingdom 12-26 October 2020.

Digital

  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2017. Photographs of the Coloured Soldiers and Sailors Club, London.
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2017. Cover of The Crisis, Special Soldiers' Number.
  • Smith, Richard W. P.. 2015. Memories of British West Indian Service in the First World War.

Research Interests

Richard has written widely on the experience of West Indian troops in both World Wars and the race and gender implications of military service in the British Empire, including Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (2004, 2009). Richard’s current research focuses on representations of black and Asian troops in popular history documentary and the role these images serve within the national memory of multicultural Britain. He also continues to research the black presence in Britain 1900-1945; the role of the mass media in the British Empire, and comparative history approaches to colonial soldiery in modern empires. Richard’s expertise is regularly sought by broadcasters, museums and archives and he is involved in a number of academic and local history initiatives marking the centenary of the First World War. Richard was on the advisory committee for the  project funded by the AHRC, he is a contributing author to  and the  and has recently joined the editorial board of the .