The Team

Toby Butler

Toby is a history lecturer at the University of East London and Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests include oral history, digital heritage, historical interpretation in museums and the social and the cultural history of London. Toby first met Raphael Samuel as a student on his MA in public history at Ruskin College, Oxford, from which he went on to study a PhD entitled 'Memoryscape and Sound Walks: Mapping Oral History on the River Thames in London' jointly supervised by the Geography department at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Museum of London. As a result of this research Toby has created several websites that use oral history recordings to explore place, and they include several freely downloadable audio walks of various places in London (www.memoryscape.or.uk). Toby is also the project director for the 'Ports of Call' project, which has been working with community groups and artists around the docks of East London to map and historically interpret the area in various ways (www.portsofcall.org.uk ). He is currently working on a trail of Victoria Park in East London for Tower Hamlets Council and as a community historian with the Hackney Society documenting the history of healthcare in Hackney.

Toby has published work on history and heritage in various edited books including 'Memoryscape : integrating oral history, memory and landscape on the river Thames' in Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (eds), People and their Pasts: Public History Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); 'Essays from the
field: science and native American burial in Kansas', in Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn and David Pinder (eds), Cultural Geography in Practice (Arnold, 2003) and co-authored 'Linked: a landmark in sound, a public walk of art' in Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson (eds), The Oral history Reader (2nd edn., Routledge, 2006). He has published journal articles in Cultural Geographies, Museum Practice, Geography Compass, Museums Journal, Social and Cultural Geography and Rising East. Toby has also published articles in magazines and newspapers including the Independent, The Guardian, Third Sector and the New Statesman. He has also authored several oral history CD collections, published by Elmbridge Borough Council and the Museum of London.

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).

Dr Kate Hodgkin

Kate teaches History and English in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London. Her research is chiefly in the area of early modern cultural history. She has published articles on various topics including witchcraft, dreams, religion and madness in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, as well as on autobiographical writing and on historical fiction, and is currently working on gender and madness in early modern England, and on early modern memory.. She is the author of Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (Palgrave, 2006). She is co-editor with Susannah Radstone of two volumes of essays, Contested Pasts: the politics of memory (Routledge, 2003), and Regimes of Memory (Routledge, 2003); both of these have been reprinted by Transaction Publishers under new titles (Memory, History Nation: contested pasts, and Memory Cultures: memory, subjectivity, recognition, Transaction 2005). She is currently completing an edition of a seventeenth-century manuscript autobiography, Women, Madness and Sin: the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Ashgate, forthcoming 2010).

Dr Michelle Johansen (Visiting Fellow)

Michelle Johansen’s PhD studentship (2000-2004) was co-sponsored by the University of East London and Bishopsgate Institute, under the auspices of the Raphael Samuel History Centre.  Her doctoral thesis 'The Public Librarian in Modern London: the Case of Charles Goss at the Bishopsgate Institute (1890-1914)' was inspired by materials held in the Bishopsgate Institute archive, specifically the Society of Public Librarians’ minute books and correspondence. The thesis was a study of the late-Victorian lower middle class and occupational identity. It also substantively revised library historiography (see Michelle Johansen, 'A Fault-Line in Library History: Charles Goss, the Society of Public Librarians and “The Battle of the Books” in the Late Nineteenth Century,' Library History, 19 (2) (July 2003), pp. 75-91).
Michelle is a social historian interested in the day to day lives of Londoners since c.1850. Professional and leisure associations, self-help and self-education, cross-regional networks and the relationship between different socio-cultural classes and groupings are particular concerns. Her current research into the boys’ club movement was informed by her involvement in ‘Up the Manor!’ an inter-generational oral history project which sought to record the history of Eton Manor Boys' Club (1909-1967). To find out more, click here: Villiers Park

Dr John Marriott

John is Reader in History in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His research interests are in the cultural and intellectual histories of London and empire, with particular reference to India in the long nineteenth century. The most significant of recent publications include The Culture of Labourism: the East End between the wars (Edinburgh University Press, 1991) and The Other Empire: metropolis, India and progress in the colonial imagination (Manchester University Press, 2003), and three 6 volume edited collections – The Metropolitan Poor: semifactual accounts, 1795 – 1910; Unknown London: early modernist visions of the metropolis, 1815 – 45; and Britain in India, 1765 – 1905. He has also published many articles and book reviews.

John is currently researching colonial modernity and the extent to which the experience of India shaped British modernism in the nineteenth century, most notably in the spheres of governance, public health, law and urban planning. In addition, he is co-editor with Philippa Levine (University of Southern California) of a new monograph series for Ashgate entitled Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650 – 2000.

Keith McClelland (Visiting Research Fellow)

Keith is currently a Research Associate in the Department of History, University College London, where he is working on an ESRC-sponsered project, Legacies of British slave-ownership. For this go to http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs

From 2001-2006 he was external examiner for the History programme at the University of East London.

His publications include Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), written with Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall, and, with Sonya O. Rose, ‘Citizenship and Empire', in At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He has also co-edited Gender and History: retrospect and prospect (Blackwell, Oxford, 2000), with Leonore Davidoff and Eleni Varikas, and E. P. Thompson. Critical Perspectives (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990), with H. J. Kaye, as well writing numerous book chapters and journal articles.

He is also co-editor, with Catherine Hall, of Race, nation and empire. Making histories, 1750 to the present (forthcoming from Manchester University Press, 2010).

From 1995-2000 he co-edited the journal, Gender and History and, from 2000-2004, was joint reviews editor. He has been on the collective of the journal since 1987.

Katy Pettit (administrator)

Katy has undertaken PhD research at UEL on '"Plenty of good plain food": the culture of East London's majority, 1880-1914'. She writes: 'My research aims are twofold. First, by beginning with ways in which the poorest came to symbolise the whole in Victorian culture, I wish to consider what the narratives about East London, created in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, might suggest about contemporary constructions of East End history. Secondly, in order to problematise the construction of these narratives, I will examine the crucial theme of food culture of the respectable middle- and upper-working-classes in East London from 1880-1914, focusing on women's experiences. Themes include food provision inside and outside of the domestic sphere, State and private education about cookery and nutrition, and issues of time and spatial organisation reflected wider cultural values. Eating is the ultimate level of consumption, and was a critical means through which respectable working-class people produced their culture, defined their identity, and distinguished themselves from other sections of society.'

Dr Susannah Radstone

Susannah is Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She writes on cultural theory, particularly on psychoanalysis and memory and on contemporary film and literature. Recent publications include (ed. with Katharine Hodgkin) Memory Cultures (Transaction 2006) (ed. with Katharine Hodgkin) The Politics of Memory: Contested Pasts (Transaction 2006); (ed.) Memory and Methodology , Berg, 2000; (ed. with Bainbridge et al) Culture and the Unconscious (Palgrave, forthcoming); (ed. with Perri 6 et al) Public Emotions (Palgrave, forthcoming). She is currently completing a monograph, On Memory and Confession: The Sexual Politics of Time, to be published by Routledge and, with Bill Schwarz, Mapping Memory, a reader and companion to memory research, to be published by Fordham University Press.

Laura Schwartz

Dr Laura Schwartz is a Career Development Fellow in History at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford. She completed her thesis 'Infidel Feminism: Religion, Secularism and Women's Rights in England c.1830-1889' at the University of East London in 2008, and is currently working on a history of women's education in Oxford.

Publications include 'Freethought, Free Love and Feminism: Secularist Debates on Marriage and Sexuality, England 1850-1885'
(Women's History Review, forthcoming 2010) and 'Nineteenth-Century Feminist Theories of Education' (Oxford Review of Education, forthcoming 2011). She is a founding member of the History of Feminism Network.

Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

Poppy's biography will be available shortly.