Dr Vanessa Taylor
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Research Fellow
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Vanessa Taylor joined the Greenwich Maritime Institute in 2009 as a Research Fellow, working with Prof. Sarah Palmer on a pilot research project: ‘Public Policy, Stakeholders and the River: a study of the governance of the River Thames – Port and Waterway – from 1900 to the Present’. She continued this research in an oral history project, talking to people involved in management and policy-making for the Thames in recent decades: ‘Thames Governance Oral Histories: 1960-2010’. Previously, Dr Taylor worked as a researcher and sessional lecturer in the Dept. of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. A post-doctoral project there with Frank Trentmann– ‘Liquid Politics: The Historic Formation of the Water Consumer’ (2005-07) – explored the politics of water consumption in modern Britain, within the ESRC-AHRC Cultures of Consumption Research Programme. Other recent work includes a consultancy project with the Environment Agency for their 2009 water resources strategy. Her PhD thesis, ‘Brewers, Temperance and the Nineteenth-Century Drinking Fountain Movement’, was completed at Birkbeck in 2006.
In August 2011, Vanessa Taylor and Sarah Palmer began a two-year, ESRC-funded research project: ‘Running the River: London, Stakeholders and the Environmental Governance of the River Thames, 1960-2010’.
Research/scholarly interests:
Social and political history of modern Britain; water history; environmental history/marine environmental history; consumption studies; metropolitan and urban history.
Selected publications:
Vanessa Taylor, Heather Chappells, Will Medd and Frank Trentmann, ‘Drought is Normal: the socio-technical evolution of drought and water demand in the UK, 1893-2006’, Journal of Historical Geography, 35 (July 2009), 568-91.
Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Water stress and sustainability’ (History and Policy Series), BBC History Magazine (Sept. 2008).
Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Hosepipes, history and a sustainable future’, History and Policy website (July 2008). At http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-75.html.
Vanessa Taylor, Book Review: W. Troesken, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster (Cambridge, MA: 2006), Medical History, 53:2 (April 2009), 306-07.
Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics: Water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city’, Past and Present, 211 (May 2011), 199-241.