Donald Filtzer is Professor of Russian History in the School of Social Sciences, Media & Cultural Studies, University of East London.  Before coming to UEL (then PEL) in 1991, he worked at the Centre for Russian & East European Studies, University of Birmingham, and the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London.  He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Glasgow (Institute of Soviet & East European Studies), where he wrote his dissertation on the Trotskyist economist, E. A. Preobrazhensky.

His special research interest is Soviet labour history, and he has published four monographs on the position of Soviet workers under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev: Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941 (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953-1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev's Reforms, 1985-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War Two (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).  He has also written an introductory textbook on the Khrushchev period, The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinization and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953-1964 (London: Macmillan, 1993).

He is currently writing a book on the standard of living, public health, and urban sanitation in the non-occupied regions of the USSR just after World War II.  This was part of a three-year research project funded by the AHRC, “Soviet State & Society During the Postwar Reconstruction, 1945-1953: Three Case Studies”, which he directed, and which ran from January 2002 to March 2005.

Kate Hodgkin 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, and 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. She is the author of Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (Palgrave, 2006). She is also 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 recently reprinted by Transaction Publishers under new titles (Memory, History Nation: contested pasts, and Memory Cultures: memory, subjectivity, recognition, Transaction 2005). She is a member of the Memory and Narrative Editorial Group. She is currently working on an edition of a seventeenth-century manuscript autobiography, Women, Madness and Sin: the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Ashgate, forthcoming 2007).

Michelle Johansen (Visiting Fellow) submitted her PhD thesis for examination last year. 'The Public Librarian in Modern London: the Case of Charles Goss at the Bishopsgate Institute (1890-1914)' is a study of library history, the lower middle class and occupational identity. The research was jointly sponsored by UEL and the Bishopsgate Institute.

Her publications are: 'The Lofty and the Mundane: Libraries as Culture Institutions in London 1890-1910' Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, Volume 5 (Leeds 2002), pp. 124-132; '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 Vol.19 No.2 July 2003, pp75-91 (This article received the CILIP Library History Award for 2004).

Michelle is employed by the Villiers Park Educational Trust as the Project Leader on 'Up the Manor', an inter-generational oral history project  This Heritage Lottery Funded project aims to record the history of Eton Manor Boys' Club (1909-1968) with the help of former club members and a group of Year Ten boys from the George Mitchell School in Leyton, east London.

To find out more, click here: Villiers Park

John Marriott 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) is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History, University College London, where he teaches modern British social, cultural and political history.

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.

From 1995-2000 he co-edited the journal, Gender & History and, from 2000-2004, was joint reviews editor. He has been on the collective of the journal since 1987.  His current research is mainly on the varieties of socialism in Britain since 1880 and their relationship to constructions of class, gender, race, citizenship and empire.

Katy Pettit is the Centre's administrator. She 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.'

Susannah Radstone 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's PhD is titled 'Religion, Feminism and Freethought, 1830-1889'. She writes:

'From Richard Carlile's celebration of female sexual pleasure in 'What Is Love?' in 1829, to Owenite Freethinkers' radical critique of the nuclear family and support for 'Free Love Unions' in the 1830s and 40s, to Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh's prosecution in 1877 for the publication of a birthcontrol pamphlet- the Freethought movement in Britain was home to a strong feminist tradition throughout the nineteenth century. Yet the contribution of Freethinking feminists to the organised women's movement has been neglected by historians of feminism, while the role of women in Freethought has never been studied in depth.

'My research focuses on a small but prominent group of female Freethinking feminists, all of whom had been practising Christians before their 'conversion' to Freethought. Their analysis of women's oppression and vision of emancipation was founded upon and informed by their Freethought and rejection of organised religion. Yet Freethinking feminism also responded to and reacted against Christian notions of womanhood and pro-women discourses. My thesis will ask what it was about the experience of rejecting previously strongly held religious beliefs which motivated female Freethinkers to argue for sexual liberation? By examining nineteenth-century Christian, Secularist and women's rights discourses as emerging in dialogue with each other I aim to reassess our understandings of the relationship between religion, radicalism, Freethought and feminism during this period.'

Barbara Taylor  (co-director) 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.