Research Team
Alastair Owens
Karen Wehner
Rupert Featherby
Nigel Jeffries

Alastair Owens, BA PhD
Principal Investigator

Senior Lecturer
Department of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
United Kingdom
Email: a.j.owens@qmul.ac.uk

Project role
Alastair is the project’s Principal Investigator with overall responsibility for co-ordinating the research programme.

Biography
Alastair was awarded BA in Geography and History from King’s College London in 1993 followed by a PhD in Historical Geography from Queen Mary, University of London in 2000. Having previously held positions at King’s College London and the University of Luton (now Bedfordshire) he is currently Senior Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Though originally from the north west, Alastair has developed a keen interest in researching and teaching London. He is convenor of Queen Mary’s MA London Studies programme and Review Editor for the London Journal.

Research interests
Alastair is interested in the historical geographies of wealth, welfare and wellbeing in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and, principally through this project, the material culture of everyday life in nineteenth-century cities. Alongside ‘Living in Victorian London’, he is currently working on a major collaborative research project (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) examining gender and investment practices in Britain between 1870 and 1930. This is part of wider interest in exploring how individuals make use of markets and institutional structures to provide for themselves and others.

Recent Publications

• Gunn, S. and Owens, A. (2006) ‘The modern city and the transformation of nature’, Cultural Geographies, 13 (4), pp. 491–496
• Owens, A., Green, D. R., Bailey, C. and Kay, A. (2006) ‘A measure of worth: probate valuations, personal wealth and in indebtedness in England, 1810–40,’ Historical Research 79 (305), pp. 383–403
• Beachy, R., Craig, B. and Owens, A. (2006, eds) Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, Berg, Oxford
• Owens, A. (2004) ‘Property, power and the city in Great Britain’, Journal of Urban History, 30 (2), pp. 299–310.
• Green, D. R. and Owens, A. (2004, eds) Family Welfare: Gender, Property and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century, Contribution to Family Studies, Number 18: Praeger, Westport, Connecticut and London, 305pp.
• Green, D. and Owens, A. (2003) ‘Gentlewomanly capitalism? Spinsters, widows and wealth holding in England and Wales, c. 1800–1860’, Economic History Review, LVI (3), pp. 510–536.

Karen Wehner, BA, MA, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Department of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
United Kingdom
Email: k.wehner@qmul.ac.uk

Project role
Karen Wehner joins the Living in Victorian London project as Post-Doctoral Research Assistant, affiliated with the ‘City Centre’ in the Department of Geography, Queen Mary University London. In this role Karen is undertaking detailed microhistorical study of individuals, households, and neighbourhoods linked to the Limehouse, Westminster, and Sydenham archaeological assemblages to facilitate the project goal of crafting material histories of the nineteenth-century metropolis.

Brief biography
A Boston, Massachusetts native, Karen has lived in northwest London for seven years, along with her husband and three young daughters. She trained as a North American historical archaeologist, receiving her MA and a PhD in Anthropology from New York University. Prior to this, Karen obtained a BA in English Literature from Yale College.

Research interests
Besides her work for this project, Karen’s other research includes a GIS-based reassessment of archival and material evidence for town-based craft production in seventeenth-century Jamestown, Virginia (Britain’s first permanent North American colony). Other research includes spatial and material analysis of changing social organization in ante- and postbellum American plantation households, and archaeological surveys and fieldwork at various eighteenth through twentieth-century domestic and workshop sites in Virginia and New York State.

Publications

• Wehner, K. (2006) Crafting Lives, Crafting Society in Seventeenth-Century Jamestown, Virginia, unpublished PhD thesis, New York University.
• Wehner, K 2004 Analyzing the settlement pattern of the Burnt Hill (NY) study area, Northeast Historical Archaeology, Vol. 32, 57-78
• Horning, A J and Wehner, K 2001 Archaeological investigations at Jamestown’s Structure 24, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg Virginia

Rupert Featherby BA MA MPhil
Archaeological consultant and collaborator

Senior Archaeologist; Archaeological Desk-based Assessments
Museum of London Archaeology Service
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London N1 7ED
Email: rfeatherby@molas.org.uk

Project role
My role within the project is as an academic contributor and advisor, after Dr Alastair Owens, and alongside my colleague, Nigel Jeffries, to Karen Wehner. Together with my colleague Nigel Jeffries, I am also responsible for co-ordinating the archaeological work for this project.

Brief biography
My historical/archaeological life began in Australia where I completed a BA and MA in Medieval Studies. I came to the UK in order to pursue these interests further, completing an MA at Sheffield in 1995 in Archaeology and Prehistory. During my studies and for two and a half years afterwards I worked as a ceramic finds specialist on a research excavation in central France. In 1999 I joined the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) as a finds processor before becoming employed as a Roman ceramic specialist. I worked in that position until May 2007 when I moved across within MoLAS to take up a position as a consultant in the Desk-based Assessment team. I have also recently completed a part-time MPhil at the Centre for English Local History at Leicester University, examining the possible influence of inheritance practices upon the economic situation of families in early modern Swaledale.

Research interests
My research interests include the study of household and material culture through history and archaeology and although my primary archaeological expertise is with Roman ceramics, similar questions posed for this project regarding material histories for the 18th and 19th centuries can be posed for earlier periods.

Recent publications

• Featherby, R, Fraser, W, Kitchen, W, (1995): ‘Microtopographie du plateau des Côtes de Clermont’ in Guichard, V, Deberge, Y, Featherby, R, Fraser, W. and Kitchen, W. (eds) Recherché de témoins archaéologiques en relation avec la conqête romaine dans le bassin de Clermont-Ferrand. (authorisation 95/060). Lodged with the Service Régionale des Antiquities D'Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand.
• Featherby, R. and Rayner, L., (2002) ‘The Roman Pottery’, in Watson, S. (ed.) An excavation in the western cemetery of Roman London, Atlantic House, City of London, MoLAS arch studies series 7
• Featherby, R. (2006) ‘The Roman Pottery’, in Ken Pitt (ed.) Roman and medieval development south of Newgate, MoLAS arch studies series 14
• Featherby, R. (2006), ‘The Iron Age and Roman pottery’, in Raoul Bull and Simon Davis (eds) Becoming Roman: Excavations of a Late Iron Age to Romano-British landscape at Monkston Park, Milton Keynes, MoLAS arch studies series 16
• Featherby, R., (2007) ‘The Roman Pottery’, in Lyon, J, (ed.) Within these walls: Roman and medieval defences north of Newgate, at the Merrill Lynch Financial Centre, City of London (MoLAS Monograph Series)
• Featherby, R., ‘The Roman Pottery’, in Casson, L, Drummond-Murray, J, and Francis, A, (in prep. eds), Excavations at 10 Gresham Street, City of London (MoLAS Monograph Series)
• Feathebry, R., ‘The Roman Pottery’ in McKenzie, M and Thomas, C, (in prep. eds), Roman Spitalfields (MoLAS Monograph Series)
  

Nigel Jeffries BA, MA
Archaeological consultant and collaborator

Medieval and later ceramic specialist
Museum of London Archaeology Service
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London N1 7ED
Email: njeffries@molas.org.uk

Project role
Nigel is an academic contributor to the project and advisor to the Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Karen Wehner. Based at the Museum of London Archaeology Service, he is responsible for co-ordinating (together with his colleague Rupert Featherby) the archaeological work for this project, in addition to characterising and interpreting the ceramics and glass from the three study sites.

Brief biography
After completing an MA at Leicester in 1995, Nigel worked as an archaeologist for Oxford Archaeology before joining the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) in 1998. His research interests are in historical archaeology: in particular household archaeologies and the associated material culture of eighteenth and nineteenth-century London. He is also interested developing new approaches to studying ‘material histories’ and narratives of objects. Nigel has supervised work placement and dissertation students for the MA programme of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (as part of the HEFCE funded project in Archive Archaeology), and for Bristol University’s MA in the Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. He has also acted as a visiting lecturer for the latter course.

Research interests
Though his principal vocation is characterising and assessing medieval and later ceramics recovered from archaeological excavations in London and it immediate environs, much of Nigel’s time at MoLAS has been spent working on the Spitalfields Market project. Here, his role as principal author (together with his colleague Nick Holder) for the publication focusing on the uncovered urban Georgian and Victorian landscape, pioneered the development of the historical and archaeological methodologies needed to unlock the ‘household archaeologies’ of this London suburb, especially through the analysis of the numerous groups of objects rapidly discarded in abandoned backyard features (particularly privies). This work stimulated the use of the archaeological record in creating object narratives, and understanding consequential themes such as consumerism, the social and geographical diversity of material culture of the metropolis and London’s role as the ‘warehouse of Empire’. Many of these agendas are described in The Biographies of London life: a collaborative research manifesto written with Dr Dan Hicks (then of The University of Bristol, now of St Cross College and the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford) focusing on the research potential of the collections held in the Museum of London’s curated resource, the London Archaeological Archives and Research Centre (LAARC). Through this AHRC project Nigel is hoping to test and develop further many of these interests within the framework of a multi-disciplinary team.

Recent publications

• Jeffries, N and Watson, B (forthcoming), ‘From Saxon Lundenwic to Victorian Rookery: Excavations at the City Lit, Keeley Street, Camden London, WC2’, LAMAS
• Holder, N and Jeffries, N (forthcoming), Spitalfields: The history of the London suburb from 1539 to the 1880s, MoLAS Monograph Series
• Jeffries, N (forthcoming), ‘The ‘material histories of the Biucchi brothers’: the archaeologies of the two Swiss-Italians and mineral water and ginger beer drinking in late 19th-century London, in C White (ed.) Materiality of Individuality, Springer
• Corcoran, J, Jeffries, N and Mackinder, T 2007 ‘Drinks by the river’ London Archaeologist, Spring 2007, Volume 11 (8), 212-17
• Jeffries, N 2006 ‘The Metropolis Management Act and the archaeology of sanitary reform in the London Borough of Lambeth 1856-1886’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 40/2, 272-90
• Jeffries, N and Watson, B 2005 ‘London that great cesspool…’ The Archaeologist, Winter 2005, 32-33. IFA magazine
• Jeffries, N 2005 Material histories of nineteenth-century Londoners: telling new tales of the Metropolis, Museum of London Friends news, July-September 2005, 10-11. Museum of London.
• Jeffries, N and Hicks, D 2004 Biographies of London life: The archaeology of Londoners and their things (1600-2000), Research Matters 3. Museum of London.