News archive 2004

King's historian wins top award

23 Nov 2004, PR 74/04

Stephen Lovell, Lecturer in Modern European History, is one of 22 academics to win one of the prestigious 2004 Philip Leverhulme Prizes.

Dr Lovell, a Russsian specialist, joined King's Department of History in 2002 following a postdoctoral research fellowship at St John’s, Oxford and a PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

The prizes recognise the outstanding research achievements of young scholars of distinction and promise based in UK institutions. Each prize is worth £50,000, representing an investment by the Leverhulme Trust of £1.1 million into five disciplines: Anthropology, Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Economics, Maths and Statistics and Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History.

The award citation reads: ‘Stephen Lovell has taken a fresh approach to Russian social and cultural history, writing with flair and imagination about a variety of innovative topics. The Russian Reading Revolution (London: Macmillan, 2000) charted the rise and fall of a ‘Russian reading myth’, showing how the Russians came to think of themselves as the ‘best-read people in the world’ by the 1970s and 1980s, and why their own carefully projected image of a homogeneous reading public, reinforced by a monopolistic system of book production, was undermined by cultural and economic change in the 1990s.

‘A second book, Summerfolk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), explored the changing functions of the dacha – the Russian summer house – as a place for leisure and relaxation in time of plenty and a source of subsistence in time of hardship. Now Lovell is working on an ambitious history of generations in Russia, another project that covers more than three hundred years. Unusually for such a young scholar, his work is both admired and published in Russia itself, particularly by prestigious literary journals whose editors have recognised the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of his contribution to scholarship.’

Last year Dr Peter Adamson of the Department of Philosophy and Dr Rebecca Flemming of the Department of Classics were awarded Philip Leverhulme prizes. (See www.kcl.ac.uk for more)

Notes to editors

King's College London
King’s is one of the oldest and largest colleges of the University of London with 13,800 undergraduate students and some 5,300 postgraduates in ten schools of study. The College had 24 of its subject-areas awarded the highest rating of 5* and 5 for research quality, demonstrating excellence at an international level. King’s is in the top group of five universities for research earnings with income from grants and contracts of more than £93 million (2002-2003) and has an annual turnover of £320 million. King’s is a member of the Russell Group, a coalition of the UK’s major research-based universities.



Further information
Melanie Gardner, Senior Public Relations Officer, King’s College London Tel: 020-7848 3073
Email: pr@kcl.ac.uk

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