Seth Koven

My teaching and research interests include gender, social, economic, and cultural history of Europe, 1750 to the present, with particular focus on Great Britain; Modern European women's history; the history of sexuality; comparative urban and cultural history.

I have published on a variety of topics including the history of disability and the body; childhood; museums for the poor; gender, maternalism and comparative welfare states (Mothers of a New World, 1993). Slumming: Social and Sexual Politics in Victorian London (Princeton University Press, 2004) explores the relationship between eros and altruism in shaping social welfare in modern Britain.

I am completing a book, The Match Girl and the Heiress:  Christian Revolution in the London Slums (under contract with Princeton University Press) about the love, friendship, and global lives of a half-orphaned Cockney match factory worker, Nellie Dowell, and the daughter of a well-to-do shipbuilder and pacifist feminist humanitarian, Muriel Lester. Nellie longed for ladies’ clean white hands; Muriel sought to free herself from the burdens of wealth; together they imagined a world without hierarchies of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. This project grew out of my ongoing study of Christian revolutionaries in 20th century Britain, who committed themselves to lives of voluntary poverty in pursuit of justice in Britain and its empire.

I am a founding member of the Rutgers British Studies Center, a major interdisciplinary scholarly project funded by a Mellon Foundation Grant, which supports visiting scholars, workshops, and seminars and provides generous funding for graduate student initiatives.  I happily supervise PhD students whose projects span the 18th to 20th centuries.

• Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 7/2006-present
• Visiting Professor, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2011
• Associate Professor of History, Villanova University, Villanova, PA 9/94-6/2006
• Visiting Scholar, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, 1997-98
• Visiting Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, 1996-1997
• Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies, Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, 9/88 to 8/94
• Lecturer on History and on History and Literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 9/87 to 8/88

• Mothers of a New World, Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, co-edited with Sonya Michel, (Routledge, 1993).
• Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton University Press, 2004; paperback, 2006)
• The Match Girl and the Heiress (under contract with Princteon University Press)

• “The ‘Sticky Sediment’ of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity, and the Problem of Wealth in early 20th Century Britain,” Representations (Fall, 2012).
• “The Jewish Question and the Social Question in Late Victorian London:  The Fictions and Investigative Journalism of Margaret Harkness,” in I.M. van den Broek, C.A.L. Smit and D.J. Wolffram (eds), Imagination and commitment. Representations of the social question. (Groningen Studies in Cultural Change Leuven: Peeters 2010).
• "The Queer Politics of Slumming,” History Workshop Journal, (Fall, 2009).
• “Gustav Doré und Dr. Barnardo:  Zur Darstellung der Armut im viktorianischen London,” in Ganz Unten Die Entdeckung Des Elends: Wien, Berlin, London, Paris, New York (Christian Brandstatter Verlag, 2007).
• "How the Victorians Read Sesame and Lilies," in Deborah Nord, ed., John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Rethinking the Western Tradition (Yale University Press, 2002)
• "Cultural Histories Old and New: Rereading the Work of Janet Oppenheim," Victorian Studies (Fall, 1997) with Mandler, Owen, and Pedersen.
• "Dr. Barnardo's 'Artistic Fictions': Photograaphy, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child in Victorian London," Radical History Review (Fall, 1997).
• "Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers and The Great War in Great Britain," American Historical Review (Oct. 1994), reprt. Journal of Peace and Justice Studies (1994).
• "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, 1880-1920," American Historical Review, (Oct. 1990) co-authored with Sonya Michel. Reprt. in Vincent and Shoemaker, eds., Gender and History in Western Europe (1998); in Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette, eds, European Women's History Reader (2002); and in State Economy and Nation in 19th Century Europe, reader published for the Open University.
• "From Rough Lads to Hooligans: Boy Life, National Culture and Social Reform," in Andrew Parker, et. al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (Routledge, 1992).
• "The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing," in D. Sherman and I. Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
• "Henrietta Barnett: The (Auto)biography of a Late-Victorian Marriage," in S. Pedersen and P. Mandler, eds., After the Victorians (Routledge, 1993).
• "Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action and Child Welfare in Great Britain 1840-1914," in Mothers of a New World.
• "Revisioning Reconstructions" in N. Finzsch and J. Martschakat, eds., Different Restorations: Reconstruction and 'Wiederaufbau' in Germany and United States (Berghan, 1996).
• "The Dangers of Castle Building: Surveying the Social Survey" in Bales, Bulmer and Sklar, editors, The Social Survey in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

• "Prisoners of Their Beds: Invalids, Injured Soldiers, and Cultures of Convalescence in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Britain," Radical History Review (Fall 2005).
• "Transatlantic Exchanges," HNET, HURBAN, October, 1999; reprinted in Historical Social Research 91 (2000) 112-117; and American Studies Journal (Winter 1999/Spring 2000) no.44.
• "The Ambivalence of Agency: Women, Families and Social Policy in France, Britain and the United States," Journal of Women's History (Spring, 1997)
• "Mother Love Among the London Poor," History Workshop Journal (Spring, 1996).

• Sonya Rudikoff Prize for Slumming as best first book in Victorian Studies published in 2004, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA)
• Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded for 2006-7
• Veritas Award for Research, Office of Mission Effectiveness, Villanova University
• Research Grant, Summer 2004, National Endowment for the Humanities
• Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1997-1998.
• Walter Love Article Prize, Honorable Mention, 1995, awarded by North American Conference on British Studies.
• Travel Grant, American Philosophical Society, Summer 1995.
• Spencer Fellow, National Academy of Education, Stanford University, 1991-92.
• Research and Travel Grant, Summer 1990 National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Grant on Gender and the Welfare State, Social Science Research Council, Fall 1989.
• Project Grant, Committee on States and Social Structures, Social Science Research Council. Co-investigator, 9/87-5/88.
• Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, 8/85 - 7/86
• Krupp Foundation, Traveling Fellow, 9/83 - 9/84
• House Arms for Service, Adams House, Harvard College 6/88
• Phi Beta Kappa, Swarthmore College 6/78
• Barnard Music Scholarship, 9/76 - 6/78

• Program Chair, North American Conference on British Studies, 2002-2005
• Member, American Historical Association, Committee on Women Historians, 2001-2004