Dr Vanessa Taylor

Job title

Research Fellow

Department

Greenwich Maritime Institute

Qualifications

BA Hons, MA, PhD

Dr Vanessa Taylor joined the Greenwich Maritime Institute (GMI) in 2009 as a Research Fellow, working with Professor 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 Department 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, Dr Taylor and Professor Sarah Palmer began a two-year, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project: ‘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

Journal articles

Taylor, V., Chappells, H., Medd, W., and Trentmann, F. (2009) Drought is normal: the socio-technical evolution of drought and water demand in the UK, 1893–2006. Journal of Historical Geography, 35(July), pp. 568–91.

Taylor, V. (2009) Rev. of W. Troesken, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster. Medical History, 53(2), pp. 306–07.

Taylor, V., and Trentmann, F. (2011) Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city. Past and Present, 211(May), pp. 199–241.

Press

Taylor, V., and Trentmann, F. (2008) Water stress and sustainability. History and Policy Series, BBC History Magazine.

Publications on the internet

Taylor, V., and Trentmann, F. 2008. Hosepipes, history and a sustainable future. Available at: www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-75.html.