Contact details
- Name:
- Dr Richard Espley
- Qualifications:
- PhD
- Position/Fellowship type:
- Associate Fellow
- Fellowship term:
- 08-Jan-2025 to 31-Jul-2030
- Institute:
- Institute of Languages Cultures and Societies
- Home institution:
- Victoria & Albert Museum
- Location:
- Victoria & Albert Museum Cromwell Road London SW7 2RL
- Phone:
- 020 7942 2634
- Email address:
- richard.espley@sas.ac.uk
Research Summary and Profile
- Research interests:
- History of art, Library
- Publication Details
-
Publications available on SAS-space:
Date Details Sep-2016 Caroline Playne: the Activities and Absences of a Campaigning Author in First World War London PeerReviewed
Caroline Playne (1857-1948) was a committed and influential pacifist and internationalist who dissected the causes of the First World War in four idiosyncratic published histories. Diagnosing the growing bellicosity of the peoples of Europe in the years before the war as a shared mental illness, she espoused many deeply conservative opinions, frequently echoing the moral outrage of contemporary temperance groups and purity crusades, for example. However, Playne was privately wholly absorbed in the charitable support of London’s enemy aliens and their dependents, including unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. Evidence of this work survives in fragments in some archives, but is suppressed from her published works and from the papers she left to the University of London, along with much of the rest of her campaigning life. This article seeks to explore the motivations of Caroline Playne in what emerges as a sustained act of biographical erasure. The image ultimately presented is of a woman who secured a voice in the public life of the city through the suppression not only of her sex, but also her limitless human compassion, and so arguably her very self.
Dec-2018 Radical Collections: Re-examining the roots of collections, practices and information professions NonPeerReviewed
Do archivists ‘curate’ history? And to what extent are our librarians the gatekeepers of knowledge? Libraries and archives have a long and rich history of compiling ‘radical collections’- from Klanwatch Project in the States to the R. D. Laing Archive in Glasgow- but a re-examination of the information professions and all aspects of managing those collections is long overdue. This book is the result of a critical conference held at Senate House Library in 2017. The conference provided a space to debate the issues and ethics of collection development, management and promotion. This book brings together some key papers from those proceedings. It shines a light on pressing topical issues within library and information services (LIS)- to encompass selection, appraisal and accession, through to organisation and classification, and including promotion and use. Will libraries survive as victims of neoliberal marketization? Do we have a responsibility to collect and document ‘white hate’ in the era of Trump? And how can a predominantly white (96.7%) LIS workforce effectively collect and tell POC histories?