Network Advisory Board Members

Dr Mark Clapson, University of Westminster, London

Dr Mark Clapson, Reader in History at the University of Westminster, is a social historian interested in the relationship between urban and suburban expansion and social change. His work is both concerned with postwar England but he has also worked on comparisons between suburbanisations and new town development in England and the USA, and recently completed a study of American influences on urban research and planning in England. His publications include Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester University Press, 1998) and A Social History of Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City (Taylor and Francis, 2003.

Email: M.Clapson@westminster.ac.uk

Department website: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/history

Dr Claire Dwyer, UCL

Dr Claire Dwyer is a Senior Lecturer in social and cultural geography at University College London where she is Deputy Director of the Migration Research Unit. Claire’s research interests are in geographies of ethnicity, gender and religion; transnationalism and diasporas; feminist and multicultural theory. She has undertaken research on Muslim identities in Britain, British South Asian diaspora commodity cultures and new suburban religious landscapes in Britain and Canada. Her publications include Transnational Spaces (co-edited with Peter Jackson and Phillip Crang, Routledge, 2004) and New Geographies of Race and Racism (co-edited with Caroline Bressey, Ashgate, 2008).

Email: claire.dwyer@ucl.ac.uk

Department website: http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk

Migration Research Unit website: http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/mru

Dr Nick Hubble, Kingston University

Dr Nick Hubble, who was born and grew up in the London suburbs, is a former Research Fellow of the Centre for Suburban Studies, Kingston University, and currently Senior Lecturer in English at Brunel University. His monograph, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2006; second edition, 2010), is a cultural history and critical exposition of the famous social research organisation founded in 1937. Other publications include the editorship of two special issues of the online journal Literary London (‘Intermodern London’, 2009, and ‘Middlebrow London’, 2011) and an online journal article ‘The Liminal Persistence of Interwar Suburbs in the Twenty-First Century’.

Email: Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk

Department website: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/arts/english

Intermodern London special: http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2009/index.html

Middlebrow London special: http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2011/index.html

Liminal persistence article: http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/entertext/issue_8.htm

Professor Joanne Jacobson,Yeshiva University, New York

Professor Joanne Jacobson is Professor of English at Yeshiva University in New York City. She has taught American studies, American literature and creative writing at the University of Iowa, at the University of Angers, France (as a Fulbright lecturer), and at Middlebury College. She grew up in suburban Chicago (USA) and her memoir Hunger Artist: A Suburban Childhood (Bottom Dog Press/ Bowling Green Station University) appeared in 2007. Professor Jacobson’s academic study Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1992.  Her critical essays and creative non-fiction have appeared in such publications as The Nation, New England Review, Fourth Genre, Massachusetts Review and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Email: jacobson@yu.edu

Department website: http://www.yu.edu/yeshiva-college/ug/english/about

Professor Louise Johnson, Deakin University, Australia

Professor Louise Johnson teaches Australian Studies at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. She has researched the gendered nature of suburban houses and shopping centre, changing manufacturing workplaces as well as the dynamics of Australian regional economies. Her most recent work has examined Geelong, Bilbao, Singapore and Glasgow as Cultural Capitals (Ashgate 2009) looking at how the arts have been revalued and urban spaces remade by the creative economy. She is currently researching how to build better suburbs, the nature of master planned suburban communities, waterfront renewal, migrants in regional centres and post-colonial planning.

Email: louise.johnson@deakin.edu.au

Department website: http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/shss/australian.php

Dr Becky Nicolaides, UCLA

Becky Nicolaides specializes in the history of North American suburbanization.  She is the author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago, 2002), and co-edited with Andrew Wiese, The Suburb Reader (Routledge, 2006).  Her current book project is entitled On the Ground in Suburbia: A Chronicle of Social and Civic Transformation in Los Angeles since 1945.  After serving on the faculties of Arizona State University West and University of California San Diego, she has been affiliated since 2007 as a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Email: bnicolaides@ucla.edu

UCLA Research Centre website: http://www.csw.ucla.edu

Becky Nicolaides webpage: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/people/research-scholars/becky-nicolaides

Professor Philip Nyden, Loyola University, Chicago

Professor Philip Nyden is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) at Loyola University Chicago.   CURL is a non-traditional research center at that involves community partners in all stages of research from conceptualization and research design to data analysis and report dissemination. Much of Professor Nyden’s work utilizes this collaborative university-community methodological approach; he has written extensively on this subject.  Among his publications are: Public Sociology: Research, Action and Change (Pine Forge Press/Sage, 2012);   Building Community: Social Science in Action, (Pine Forge Press/Sage, 1997); and “Collaborative Research: Harnessing the Tensions between Researcher and Practitioner” which appeared in The American Sociologist.  He has done substantial research on what produces stable racially, ethnically, and economically diverse communities in the U.S. and is currently working on a follow-up to a 1998 national, nine-city study funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and published as a dedicated issue of HUD’s policy journal, Cityscape. He is involved in activist researcher networks linking community-based research across regional and national boundaries.  With colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney Shopfront (Australia) and CURL, he co-edits a peer-reviewed journal, Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement.

Email: pnyden@luc.edu

Center for Urban Research and Learning website: http://www.luc.edu/curl

Dr Timotheus Vermeulen, Radboud University, Nijmegan

Dr Timotheus Vermeulen is lecturer in Cultural Theory at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is also co-director of the University’s newly founded Centre for New Aesthetics and founding editor of the academic webzine Notes on metamodernism. Timotheus has published on critical theory, contemporary aesthetics, and film and television in various journals and magazines, collections and catalogues, including The Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Frieze, and MONU. He is currently working towards a monograph and an edited collection on metamodernism together with Robin van den Akker, and an edited volume on the representation of suburbia with Martin Dines.

Email: tjvvermeulen@gmail.com

Department for Literary and Cultural Studies website: http://www.ru.nl/comparativearts

Centre for New Aesthetics website:  www.newaesthetics.net