Dr Anja Shortland, Professor in Political Economy at Kings College London, will speak at this evening about her latest book—Lost Art—in which she explores how the market developed a private art recovery alternative to expensive litigation: a firm specialised in negotiating voluntary restitutions, profit-sharing between claimants, and - occasionally - ransoms.

Countless dollars of art are stolen or looted every year, yet governments often consider art theft a luxury problem. With limited public law enforcement, what prevents thieves, looters and organised criminal gangs from flooding the market with stolen art? How can theft victims get justice – even decades after their loss? What happens if the legal definition of a good title is at odds with what is morally right?

Enter the Art Loss Register, a private database dedicated to tracking down stolen artworks. Blocking the sale of disputed artworks creates a space for private resolutions – often surprisingly amicable but sometimes entertainingly adversarial. Anja Shortland’s new book Lost Art explores the dark side of the global art market through the recovery stories from the Art Loss Register’s archive.

Anja Shortland is a Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London. Anja studies private governance in the world’s trickiest markets: hostages, fine art, and antiquities—and how people live, trade, and invest in complex and hostile territories. Anja was an Engineering and Economics undergraduate at Oxford and did her Masters and PhD in International Relations at the LSE. Before coming to King's she worked as a lecturer in Economics at Leicester, a Reader in Economics at Brunel University and as a consultant to the World Bank.

We open doors at 6pm and the talk itself will begin at 6.30pm, with a Q&A session taking place after the lecture at approximately 7:15pm.