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Staff in the School of Historical Studies

STUDENT SUPPORT STAFF

If you have a query about studying with us, our research activities or require further information, please contact faculty staff.

Head of School

ACADEMIC STAFF 

EMERITUS STAFF 

  • Professor Francis Ames-Lewis At the time of his retirement from Birkbeck College, Francis Ames-Lewis was the Pevsner Professor of the History of Art. He lectured on Italian late Medieval and Renaissance Art in the College for 36 years (1969-2005). He published some 25 papers and chapters in scholarly journals and edited collections, several edited books, and six single-authored books including Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 1981 and 2000), The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (Yale University Press, 2000), and Isabella and Leonardo (Yale University Press, 2012). He was sometime Chairman of three College committees (Library Committee, Quality Assurance Committee, and Buildings Committee), and was Vice-Master (1998-2002) and Acting Master in Autumn 2001. Francis Ames-Lewis is also a Fellow of Birkbeck, view Francis Ames-Lewis' fellows page or
  • Adrian Babbidge Honorary Reader in Museology Adrian Babbidge has long experience in the museums and heritage sector as a curator, manager and consultant, latterly specialising in governance, financial, legal and strategic management issues. He has published practical guidance in these areas, and contributed reports for both local and national government. His current research interests are in museums policy and the use of data to inform the study of the historical development of museums. He has published several papers on these topics, especially in the journal Cultural Trends. He continues to develop his statistical observatory with the aim of helping the development of a longitudinal perspective on changes in UK museums.
  • Professor Joanna Bourke Joanna Bourke is Professor Emerita of History. She specialises in cultural history, with an emphasis on violence, militarism, masculinity, the emotions, pain, and what it means to be human. She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, as well as over 120 articles in academic journals. In 2022, Reaktion Books published Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence and Oxford University Press published Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Education for Working People. She is currently writing a book entitled Evil Women. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek.
  • Professor Annie Coombes Professor Emerita of Material and Visual Culture Annie E. Coombes was Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery at Birkbeck, University of London. Previous roles at Birkbeck have included, Director of Postgraduate Studies (2002 to 2005) and Head of the School of History of Art, Film and Screen Media (2005 to 2008), appointing six new members of academic staff, and overseeing the development of the Birkbeck Cinema and the transformation of the School during a period of major restructuring.
  • Professor Christy Constantakopolou
  • Professor Mark Crinson taught architectural history at Birkbeck (2016-2023), and before that at the University of Manchester (1993-2016). He was Vice-President then President of the European Architectural History Network, 2016-20. Recent books include Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022, winner of the 2024 Historians of British Art Prize), The Architecture of Art History – A Historiography (2019, co-authored with Richard J. Williams), Alison and Peter Smithson (2018), and Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017). His current book, titled Heathrow’s Genius Loci, will be finished in summer 2024. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.  
  • Professor Peter Draper Honorary Life Member of the College Peter Draper is Visiting Professor in the History of Architecture, having been both a lecturer and senior lecturer in the History of Art Department. He was Honorary Editor of Architectural History, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain from 1985 to 1992, and served as president of the society from 2000 to 2004. He was Chairman of the Fabric Advisory Committee at Southwark Cathedral from 1995 to 2008 and was a member of the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England from 2001 to 2011.
  • Professor Dorothy Edgington Dorothy Edgington is a Senior Research Fellow and Fellow of the British Academy. Dorothy works mainly in philosophical logic, particularly on conditionals, counterfactual reasoning, probabilistic reasoning and vagueness. She is currently involved in a project on probabilities, propensities and conditionals at the Institute of Philosophy. She supervises research students working on conditionals, vagueness and indeterminacy, ontology, self-knowledge and emotions. .
  • Professor Orlando Figes
  • Professor Ken Gemes
  • Dr Tag Gronberg Reader Emerita in the History of Art and Design Tag Gronberg's research interests include gender and modernism, particularly across art, design and architecture. Her books on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture in France and Austria extend the study of gender and urban modernity to incorporate debates on architecture, craft and consumption. She has published on issues to do with memory, including the recent retrieval and display of Titanic artefacts. Her current projects explore gender and 1920s visual culture in France, Austria and Britain, including fashion, photography, film and interior design.
  • Professor Samuel Guttenplan Samuel Guttenplan is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, having taught at Birkbeck from 1976 to 2010. During that time, he served two times as Departmental Head and was Dean of a group of Humanities Departments from 1992 to 1996. He was one of the founders of the Politics, Philosophy and History programme and the Head of the London International Programme. Professor Guttenplan’s research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and ethics. In addition to many articles and reviews, he has edited The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Mind and published Mind’s Landscape (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), Objects of Metaphor (Oxford University Press, 2005) and currently completing Roots of Categorization (under contract to Oxford University Press). He has also published The Languages of Logic, a widely used text in formal logic and is one of the authors of Reading Philosophy (Wiley Blackwell, 2nd edition, 2021), which is part of a series of which he is one of the overall editors. Visit Samuel Guttenplan's fellows page or
  • Professor Vanessa Harding is Emeritus Professor of London History. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern London, with particular interest in housing and the built environment; family and household; health and disease, including plague; death and burial. She is Trustee and Chair of the Historic Towns Trust, publishers of the British Historic Towns Atlas, and President of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society.
  • Professor John Henderson John Henderson is Emeritus Professor of Italian Renaissance History, Birkbeck, University of London, and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. He has written widely on the history of Italy from the Renaissance to the early modern period, with a special interest in history of religion, charity, medicine and public health. His most recent book is Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City, and his interdisciplinary study of the experience and representation of the Great Pox, The French Disease in Renaissance Italy, will be published by CUP in 2024. On-going research projects include a study of environment and health in early modern Tuscany, and a study of the role of popular medical practice in early modern Italy. He is co-editor with Jonathan Nelson of the Cambridge University Press book series ‘Renaissance Elements’. 
  • Professor Jennifer Hornsby
  • Professor Michael Hunter
  • Professor Sue James
  • Professor Joni Lovenduski
  • Professor Lynda Nead Pevsner Professor of History of Art Emerita. Professor Nead was twice Head of the Department of History of Art and Screen Media, she was also Director of Postgraduate Studies and was a founder of the Centre for the History and Theory of Photography.Professor Nead has published widely in a range of art historical areas, including the representation of the female body, gender and the city, post-war British art and culture and relationships between art, photography and film. Her current research interests are gender, desire and the image in post-war Britain and a study for the British Film Institute Film Classics series. She has been a Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is currently Trustee of the Campaign for the Arts and the Holburne Museum, Bath.
  • Professor Daniel Pick historian and psychoanalyst, worked at Birkbeck between 2005 and 2022. He led the team-based research project, ‘Hidden Persuaders’, funded by a senior investigator award from the Wellcome Trust. Daniel contributed to various teaching programmes including MA courses in ‘History of Ideas', and 'Psychoanalytic Studies’. He supervised and examined numerous doctoral projects. He is a fellow of both the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Royal Historical Society, and received the Sigourney Award, 2023. He has co-edited, with other historians, collections of essays on dreams, psychoanalysis and totalitarianism, and on the idea of denial in history. His own books include Faces of Degeneration, Svengali’s Web, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, and Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control.
  • Professor Anthony Price Anthony Price came to Birkbeck as a lecturer in 1995, was soon promoted to reader and subsequently to professor. His work in Greek philosophy strives to do justice to the texts, but is always primarily philosophical in its goals, which are to increase our self-understanding as ethical agents through interpreting the texts in ways that attend to the details of their arguments and formulations, attempting to make the best and most fruitful sense of these. His principal research interests are in Greek ethics and moral psychology, and in contemporary ethics.
  • Professor David-Hillel Ruben David-Hillel Ruben has a BA from Dartmouth College (USA) and a PhD from Harvard University. He began his career at the University of Edinburgh as tutor and subsequently has held lectureships at Glasgow, Essex, and City universities. He was made a professor at the LSE in 1994 and has been at Birkbeck on a part-time basis since 2004. His research interests are in philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of action and metaphysics. He has published books on Marxism, social holism and individualism, explanation, and action..
  • Professor Leslie Topp Leslie Topp is Professor Emerita of History of Architecture. Leslie was Head of the Department of History of Art from 2017 to 2020 and co-founder of the Compass Project, supporting forced migrants to study at Birkbeck. Her research is in the social history of architecture, focusing on the architecture of institutions of confinement, including asylums and prisons, and on the beginnings of modern architecture in Vienna. She is author of Freedom and the Cage (Penn State University Press, 2017) and Architecture and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She left her full-time role at Birkbeck in 2023 to retrain in law.
  • Professor William Vaughan Emeritus Professor of History of Art, visit William Vaughan's fellow page
  • Professor Jerry White Emeritus Professor of Modern London History, Jerry White taught at Birkbeck from 2009 to 2019. He is the author of several books on the social history of modern London, including a widely-praised trilogy covering the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a winner of the Wolfson History Prize and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His most recent book is The Battle of London 1939-45. Endurance, Heroism and Frailty under Fire (Bodley Head, 2021) and he is working on a study of London in a revolutionary world, 1789-1815.

RESEARCH FELLOWS 

  • Dr David Bannister, Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Dr Ruth Beecher, Senior Research Fellow
  • Dr Allison Deutsch, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Nineteenth-Century European Art
  • Dr Eliana Hadjisavvas, Alfred Landecker Lecturer Fellow
  • Dr Sasha Hepburn – on leave 2023-4
  • Dr Lenny Hodges, Early Career Fellow
  • Dr Sarah Howard, Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Dr Becka Hudson
  • Dr Simon Huxtable, Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Dr Rhian Keyse, Postdoctoral Researcher, Modern African History
  • Dr Matthew Leonard, Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Dr William Pimlott

HONORARY RESEARCH FELLOWS 

  • Professor Robert Aldrich
  • Mr Adnan Almohamad is a PhD candidate in The Institute of Archaeology and Classical Studies (ASA), University of Lausanne. He is also currently the Arabic Translation Coordinator in the project of International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA). His master's degree in Archaeology of the Ancient Near East and Egypt was awarded by Charles de Gaulle University, France in 2008. From 2009 to 2014, he worked at DGAM of Syria, he also lectured on ancient pottery in the Department of Archeology at the University of Aleppo. His current work focuses on documenting the looting and destruction of archaeological sites in northern Syria and the relationships of local communities in Syria with their cultural heritage before and during the war.
  • Dr Clare Barlow
  • Dr Katy Barrett
  • Dr Julianna Barone Juliana Barone was awarded her Doctorate at Trinity College and had a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, both at Oxford University. She has taught at Oxford University and Birkbeck College, published extensively on Leonardo da Vinci’s visual and written works, as well as on their historical reception. She has curated exhibitions in London, Milan, and Florence, is on the board of specialised journals and of the Leonardo da Vinci Society. Her main publications include Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion (2019); Leonardo in Britain: Collections and Historical Reception (with S. Avery-Quash) (2019); Leonardo in Seventeenth-Century France: Paradoxical Legacies (2013); I disegni di Leonardo da Vinci e della sua cerchia (with M. Kemp) (2010).
  • Dr Jason Bate
  • Dr Stefan Bauer
  • Dr Ruth Beecher
  • Dr Monica Bohm-Duchen
  • Dr Alexander Boyd
  • Dr Stephen Brogan
  • Dr Carolyn Burdett
  • Ms Rosa Campbell
  • Dr Anna Clarke
  • Dr Cristian Constantinescu
  • Dr Matt Cook
  • Dr Luisa Corna
  • Dr Joe Cronin
  • Dr Isabel Davis Isabel Davis is Research Leader at the Natural History Museum, co-ordinating Arts and Humanities Research. Her research interests include cultural histories of reproductive health, 'one health', environmental studies, premodern literature and culture, and museum collections.
  • Dr Alison Deutsch
  • Dr Lauren Douglas Dr Lauren Douglas is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Historical Studies. She was recently awarded her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. Her work is focused on the philosophy of Descartes and Early Modern theories of perception and language. She also created and runs the London Cartesian Circle research network.
  • Professor Sir Richard Evans Richard J. Evans was Professor of History at Birkbeck from 1989 to 1998 and Vice-Master from 1993 to 1998. He has published widely on modern European and German history, notably The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. He is the author of In Defence of History (1997), based on lectures delivered at Birkbeck from 1993 to 1997. He was the lead expert witness for the defence in the libel action brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving against the historian Deborah Lipstadt, the basis for the movie Denial (2016).
  • Professor Roy Foster
  • Dr Thomas Frankfort
  • Dr Chet Fransch
  • Dr Magnus Fried
  • Dr Stacie Frienal
  • Professor Stephen Frosh
  • Dr Katherine Harvey Dr Katherine Harvey is a medieval historian, with particular interests in ecclesiastical history and the history of medicine, gender and the body. She was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Birkbeck from 2014-17, and has also taught on various medieval and early modern history modules in the department. Her publications include Episcopal Appointments in England, c. 1214-1344 (Ashgate, 2014) and The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2021). She is also a frequent contributor to periodicals including History Today, BBC History Magazine, Aeon, The Times Literary Supplement and The Sunday Times. Visit Dr Katherine Harvey's website.
  • Dr Louise Hide
  • Dr Kat Hill
  • Dr Katherine Hill
  • Dr Claire Hilton Claire Hilton is Honorary Archivist at the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych). From 1998 to 2017 she was a NHS consultant old age psychiatrist in London. She has a MA and PhD in history and has authored two monographs Improving Psychiatric Care for Older People: Barbara Robb's Campaign 1965-1975 (2017) and Civilian Lunatic Asylums During the First World War (2021). While Historian in Residence at the RCPsych she was awarded a “President’s Medal” for her historical work contributing to mental healthcare education, policy and practice. Her current research is on mental hospitals in England in the 1920s.
  • Dr Simon Huxtable
  • Dr Peter James Jackson
  • Dr Katie Joice Postdoctoral Researcher,
  • Prof Hussein Kassim
  • Dr Keith Kahn-Harris
  • Dr Rhian Keyse
  • Vanessa King FSA FHEA I was a lecturer in medieval and early modern history at Birkbeck for 24 years (1999-2023). I have published widely in the field of Domesday Studies and the impact of the Black Death on Walsham le Willows, Suffolk. I regularly organise and run sessions at the annual International Medieval Conference held at Leeds. I am currently writing a book for Routledge provisionally entitled Early Queenship 600-1066 and more information can be found on my website. I am delighted to continue my association with the College as an honorary fellow.
  • Dr Gabriel Koureas Dr Gabriel Koureas completed his PhD at Birkbeck where he taught from 2000 to 2019 and is now a research fellow. He is also a fellow and associate lecturer at the University of Nicosia. His research focuses on the memory and representation of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to gender, sexuality and nationalism. His publications include works on the memory of the First World War, gendered representations of the terrorist, art and the senses, the visual culture of colonial wars of independence, and transcultural memories of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East in contemporary art. His groundbreaking edited volume Contemporary Art from Cyprus provides the first academic study of Cypriot contemporary art. He is currently co-editing a special issue of the academic journal History of Photography titled Disrupting the Archive: Processes of Decolonisation and Photography in Cyprus. He also works as a freelance curator and is the director of the Céladon Centre for the Arts, a newly established non-profit organisation aiming to foster a resilient and sustainable community of cultural producers.
  • Dr Hugh Lawson-Tancred Originally graduating from Balliol College Oxford, Hugh has been associated with philosophy at Birkbeck for more than 30 years, initially concentrating on ancient philosophy but now mainly working in the philosophy of science and technosocial issues. He is also the CEO of a small natural language processing company. His current focus is on the philosophy of developmental cognitive neuroscience, human-machine interaction, data ethics, privacy and the containment of the burgeoning technology of artificial general intelligence, in particular in respect of its potential threat to democratic processes.
  • Dr Yorai Linenberg
  • Dr Louise London
  • Dr Rui Miguel Ponte Vieira Lopes Having taught and researched at the London School of Economics and Political Science, at Goldsmiths and, more recently, at Birkbeck, Rui Lopes has specialized in the study of Cold War visual culture (particularly cinema, television, and comic books), African anticolonialism, and the international dimension of Portugal’s ‘New State’ dictatorship. He is currently Vice-Director of the Institute of Contemporary History, at NOVA University, in Lisbon.
  • Dr Noemi Magnani
  • Dr Steph Marston
  • Dr Carlota Matesanz Sanchioli
  • Dr Kasia Murawska-Muthesius Dr Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius was Curator and Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw. She taught art history at Birkbeck, and at the Humboldt University Berlin. Her publications include Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (Polish Academy 2000); National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (2001); Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (Black Dog 2011, with Natalia Zarzecka), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Ashgate 2015, with Piotr Piotrowski); Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to the Communist Bloc (Routledge 2021). Her current research is on caricature and its historiography. Murawska-Muthesius.com
  • Dr Christian Onof
  • Dr Aphrodite Papayianni
  • Dr Julie Peakman
  • Dr Lucy Peltz
  • Dr Diana Popescu
  • Dr Janet Powell Dr Janet Powell completed her PhD at Birkbeck in 2015 and subsequently held a five-year Research Associateship at the Institute of Classical Studies in London. Her principal research interest is the economy of fourth-century BC Athens. She has published on the use of numbers by the writer Xenophon in his text Poroi and is currently preparing a monograph based on her PhD research for publication by Routledge. In this work she assesses Xenophon’s recognition of financial, physical and socially constructed risks, in order to understand Athenian mitigation of risk in their decision-making in the ancient silver industry and beyond. View Dr Janet Powell's profile on Academia
  • Dr Lubomira Radoilska
  • Dr David Ranan
  • Dr Frank Riess Publications: ‘Dawn and sunset description in Borges’ poetry’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, XLIX, 4 (Oct 1972) 383-397;  The Word and the Stone. Language and Imagery in Neruda’s Canto General (OUP.1972);  ‘From Aachen to Al-Andalus: the journey of Deacon Bodo’ Early Medieval Europe XIII, 2 (2005) 131-157;  Narbonne and its Territory in Late Antiquity. From the Visigoths to the Arabs (Ashgate, 2014); ‘La Espada Encendida and the poetry of William Blake : source or tradition?’ Cantalao, I, 2 (March 2014) 42-45;  The Journey of Deacon Bodo from the Rhine to the Guadalquivir. Apostasy and Conversion to Judaism in Early Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2019)
    Current work: A biography of Johannes of Dreux, a 12th century Norman who converted to Judaism and travelled to the Levant. He became known as Obadiah the Proselyte. Provisional title: The Scroll of Obadiah. (Forthcoming 2025).
  • Dr Elly Robson
  • Dr Eleanor Robson
  • Dr Ellie Robson
  • Dr Gabriella Romano Dr Gabriella M. Romano is an independent historian and a documentarist, whose main interest is the history of sexuality and homosexuality in Italy focussing on Fascism, and women’s history. On these two topics, she has published books and essays, and she has written, produced and directed several documentaries. Her most recent publication is Italian Fascism’s Forgotten LGBT victims. Asylums and Internment, 1922–1943. London: Bloomsbury 2023. In 2022, she received a Gerda Henkel Foundation Grant to expand her research on the repression of sexuality through internment in Southern Italy. She is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.
  • Dr Beckie Rutherford
  • Dr Lisa (Elisabeth) Salje
  • Professor Anthony Savile
  • Dr George Severs Dr George Severs is a historian of sexual health, sexual violence and HIV/AIDS. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland where he works on the history of sexual health and race in modern Britain. Before moving to Geneva, George was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck on the Wellcome-funded Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters (SHaME) project, led by Professor Joanna Bourke. He is the author of Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury, 2024).
  • Dr Peter Singer
  • Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh
  • Dr Diana Stein-Wuenscher
  • Dr Anne Summers
  • Professor Pat Thane
  • Ms Sorcha Thomson
  • Dr Stella Tilly
  • Dr Julie Wheelwright Julie Wheelwright (FRHS) is the author of several works of history, most recently Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey 2020). She has devised specialist creative writing workshops for the Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters (SHaME) project on the uses of narrative to explore traumatic experience and recovery. She holds a doctorate in journalism from City, University of London, where she founded and directed creative writing programmes in narrative non-fiction. She is a subject expert in the history of women’s military involvement in conflict, including the intelligence services in the First and Second World Wars. 
  • Dr Neil Wilcock Neil Wilcock is a specialist in Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of Education with a particular focus on the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, and Paulo Friere. His research has focussed on building a new methodological foundation for political philosophy with education at its heart. The has culminated the publication of Education, Authority, and the Critical Citizen in 2023. He is currently working on expanding this research into an accompanying theory of economy that transcends the dichotomy of capitalism versus socialism by incorporating an anarchist critique of economic principles.
  • Dr Collette Wilson

Life Fellows

  • Dr Laura Jacobus

TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP STAFF

  • Dr Charlotte Ashby
  • Dr Clare Vernon
  • Dr Tom Wilkinson
  • Dr Stuart Brookes
  • Dr Steph Bowry
  • Michael Berlin

Visiting and affiliated academics

Visiting Professors