Directors

Dr Matt Cook (co-director)

Matt is a cultural historian based in the  Birkbeck College's Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. He specialises in the history of sexuality and the history of London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He is an editor of History Workshop Journal and an  Associate Dean in Birkbeck's School of Social Science, History and Philosophy. He was previously a lecturer in modern British History at Keele University.

Matt  is part of the convening team for the MA/MSc in Gender, Sexuality, Politics and Culture at Birkbeck and   is currently working on a book exploring queer families and domesticity in the twentieth century. For further details of publication, research interests and teaching areas go to http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hca/staff/mattcook.

Professor Barbara Taylor (co-director)

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Modern History in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her publications include: Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, Virago and New York, Pantheon, 1983; Harvard University Press, 1993) which won the 1983 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize; Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 1650-1850 (co-edited with Sarah Knott, Palgrave Press, 2005), as well as many book chapters and journal articles. She reviews regularly for the London Review of Books.

Barbara Taylor is an editor of History Workshop Journal, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and served on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Historical Research from 2003 to 2006. She has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Amsterdam and Indiana, Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and has lectured at universities throughout Europe and North America. She has won many research fellowships, including from the Nuffield Foundation, the British Academy, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 1998 to 2001, she was Director of a three-year international research project, ‘Feminism and Enlightenment, 1650-1850: a Comparative History', funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Barbara Taylor's field of research is British and European intellectual and cultural history, c 1650-1850, with specialist interests in: feminist ideas, writers and movements; Enlightenment philosophy and cultural practices; histories of subjectivity; the application of psychoanalytic ideas to historical enquiry. She is currently researching attitudes to solitude in Enlightenment Britain.

For further details see this page.

Stefan Dickers

Stefan is the Library Special Collections Manager at Bishopsgate Institute and looks after the Raphael Samuel Archive, along with its other numerous collections on the history of London, the labour movement, co-operation, freethought and humanism. These include the personal papers of politicians George Howell, Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake, and the organisational archives of the London Co-operative Society, the Eton Manor Boys’ Club, the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Association and the Stop the War Coalition.

He qualified as an archivist in 2001 and started at Bishopsgate in 2005. Previous to this, Stefan worked in the archives of the London School of Economics and Senate House Library. He will talk at extraordinary length about the collections whenever asked and regularly entertains groups of students and family/local history societies on the wonders they can find at Bishopsgate Library. He is also secretary of the Archives and Resources Committee of the Society for the Study of Labour History and sits on the committees of the Socialist History Society and the oral history consortium Britain at Work, 1945-1995. Stefan is also co-founder of the Network of Radical Libraries and Archives (NORLA).