Anja Shortland

Anja Shortland is a Professor in Political Economy at King’s College, London. Her undergraduate degree in Engineering at Oxford, a Masters in the Political Economy at LSE and a PhD in International Relations (also at the LSE), followed by appointments as Lecturer and Reader in Economics at Leicester and Brunel Universities make her a truly interdisciplinary scholar.

Anja teaches and studies the economics of crime, specialising in the governance of trades between legal entities and underworld organisations.  She is an expert on piracy, kidnapping, art recovery, cultural property crime, and ransomware. Her novel insights into these opaque markets have been published in top academic journals and were widely covered in podcasts and the press, including articles in the Economist and the New Yorker. Her first book Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business was published by OUP in 2019 and won the Douglas North Award for the ‘Best Book in Institutional Economics’. Her second book Lost Art, the Art Loss Register’s Case Book (Unicorn, 2021) examines how the art market developed norms and processes for the restitution of stolen and looted art.

Anja lives in Wiltshire, England with her husband, two children, her flute and thousands of bees.

Photo courtesy of Urszula Sołtys