Dr Steven Taylor

Email: steven.j.taylor@warwick.ac.uk

Research

I joined the University of Warwick as an Assistant Professor in History in September 2026, having previously held research and teaching positions at University College Dublin and the Universities of Kent and Leicester. I am a social and cultural historian whose research explores the histories of health, childhood, food, migration, and everyday life in modern Europe and North America.

My current research is focused on the history of childhood diet and health. I am Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Trust-funded project Junk Foods: A Transnational History of Childhood, Diet, and Health in Post-War Europe. The project examines how branded snacks, drinks, and fast food became embedded in children’s lives after the Second World War, and how ideas about ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ food changed over time. Working across Britain, Ireland, Poland, and Italy, the project brings together archival research with the memories and experiences of people who grew up during this period. I am particularly interested in how cultural, political, and commercial influences shaped changing attitudes towards children’s diets, and why particular foods came to be understood as problematic.

My previous research has examined the histories of childhood, mental health, and disability in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, as well as the experiences of Irish migrants in twentieth-century London and New York. Before joining Warwick, I was a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin, where I worked on the European Research Council-funded DIASPORA project.

I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches that connect institutional and cultural histories with lived experience. Across my research, I seek to understand how wider social, political, and cultural changes were experienced by individuals and communities.

Select publications

Books

Steven J. Taylor and Steven King, Lunacy and Lunatic Asylums in the Long Nineteenth Century, (London: Routledge 2026), DOI10.4324/9781003244509

Rob Ellis, Sarah Kendal, and Steven J. Taylor (eds),Voices in the History of Madness: Patient and Practitioner Perspectives,(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2021), DOI10.1007/978-3-030-69559-0

Steven J. Taylor and Alice Brumby (eds), Healthy Minds in the Twentieth Century: In and Beyond the Asylum, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2020), DOI10.1007/978-3-030-27275-3

Steven J. Taylor, Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-60027-1

Articles

Steven J. Taylor, ‘Children, Poverty and Mental Health in Rural and Urban England, 1850-1907’, Rural History, 31/2 (2021), pp.151-164,DOI10.1017/S0956793319000372

Steven J. Taylor, ‘“She was Frightened while Pregnant by a Monkey at the Zoo”: Constructing the Mentally Imperfect Child in Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 30/4 (2017), pp.748-766, DOI 10.1093/shm/hkw129

Steven J. Taylor, ‘Depraved, Deprived, Dangerous and Deviant: Depicting the Insane Child in England’s County Asylums, 1845-1907’, History, 101/347 (2016), pp.513-535, DOI 10.1111/1468-229x.12246

Steven J. Taylor, ‘Poverty, Emigration and Family: Experiencing Childhood Poverty in Late-Nineteenth-Century Manchester’, Family and Community History, vol.18/2, (2015), pp.89-103, DOI 10.1179/1463118015Z.00000000043

Steven J. Taylor, ‘Insanity, Philanthropy and Emigration: Dealing with Insane Children in Late-Nineteenth-Century North-West England’, History of Psychiatry, vol.25/2 (2014), pp.224-236, DOI 10.1177/0957154X14523238