Dr John Seed

 

Qualifications: BA, PGCE, PhD Telephone: +44 (0)20 8392 3236 Email Address: J.Seed@roehampton.ac.uk

Introduction

My research falls into two main areas:

1. religious dissenters in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England.

2. urban history, especially the history of migrants in London.

Research

Religious dissenters in eighteenth-century England.

I gave papers on this topic at recent conferences at Roehampton University (2008), Yale University (2008) and the University of London's Institute of Historical Research (2009).

Recent publications include:

‘History and narrative identity: religious dissent and the politics of memory in eighteenth-century England’ Journal of British Studies Vol.44, No.1, (Jan.2005).

‘The spectre of Puritanism: forgetting the seventeenth century in David Hume’s History of England’, Social History, Vol.30, No.4, (Nov.2005), pp.444-462

‘The deadly principles of fanaticism’: puritans and dissenters in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ in History Remade: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History, eds James Moore, Ian Macgregor Morris and Andrew Bayliss, (London: University of London Press, 2008)

Dissenting Histories: religious division and the politics of memory in eighteenth-century England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

Urban History

One of my main areas of work here has been on the social history of migrants into London. The small Chinese community betwen the 1870s and the 1950s has held my attention for a number of years.

I have given a number of papers on this topic: to a conference on literary representations at Goldsmith's College, London, in 2003, at a Cultural Studies seminar at Roehampton University in 2004, at the Local History Centre at Kingston University and at the Conference of Local and Regional Historians in 2005, at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2006, at Nottingham Trent University in 2007, at 'Footsteps of the Dragon', a conference held in the London Metropolitan Archives in 2008, at Cardiff University in 2008 and at an international conference on Asians in Europe at the University of Salzburg in 2009. I presented the film Broken Blossom (1919) at the Chinese New Year Film Festival at the Docklands Museum in February 2005; and Piccadilly(1929) at the Docklands Museum in 2006 and at the British Museum in 2007.

Recent publications include:

‘”Limehouse Blues”: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks,1900-1940’, History Workshop Journal, No. 62 (Autumn 2006), pp.58-85

A version of a talk at the Museum in Docklands in January 2007 can be found on the Museum of London website:
http://www.untoldlondon.org.uk/archives/TRA43336.html

This work was also featured in the second episode of the BBC radio 4 series, The Chinese in Britain, broadcast during April and May 2007.

I am currently investigating the broader question of migrants, both external and internal, and the London labour market. One forthcoming publication is ‘Free labour = latent pauperism’: Marx, Mayhew and the “reserve army of labour”’ forthcoming in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity, eds Simon Gunn & James Vernon, (University of California Press, 2010).

I have also recently completed a book entitled Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed, to be published by Continuum in the summer of 2010. This is a critical reading of one of the most important and complex of thinkers on interactions between economics, history and politics.

Future research

I am now working on three projects:

1. In July 2008 I was co-organiser with Ian Haywood of a conference on the 1780 Gordon Riots. We have now been commissioned by Cambridge University Press to edit a collection of original essays on this hugely important event. We expect this book to see the light of day in the spring of 2011. Meanwhile I and several other contributors are leading a debate at the Long Eighteenth-Century Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on the 230th anniversary of the riots.

2. I am returning to the question of Dissenting histories and contributing a chapter on the teaching of history to the Dissenting Academies project and its projected CUP volume.

3. In the longer term I am planning a book on migrants, vagrants and sojourners in nineteenth-century London. This will take further recent work on the Chinese in London, on Marx and 'the reserve army of labour' and a considerable amount of unpublished research on vagrants and the Poor Law.

Teaching & examining

My undergraduate and postgraduate teaching expertise overlaps, of course, with my areas of research:

1. Intellectual and political history in the eighteenth century.

2. The social history of London, 1750-1950.

3. Historiography and critical theory.

I have been an external examiner for undergraduate programmes at Manchester Metropolitan University and at the former University of Humberside, now the University of Lincoln.

I have supervised 4 Ph.Ds to completion at Roehampton (and 2 as an external supervisor at other universities). I have been an external examiner for Ph.Ds at Kingston, Manchester Metropolitan and Sussex Universities.

Consultancies Undertaken

I was a consultant in 2007 and 2009 on several BBC radio 4 programmes to do with the Chinese in Britain.