Dr Victoria Taylor

Dr Victoria Taylor, BA (Hons), MRes, AFHEA is an award-winning aviation historian who completed her PhD thesis on the politicisation of the Luftwaffe in the Third Reich at the University of Hull and Sheffield Hallam University. As part of the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, she delivers teaching on air power for junior RAF officers at the Joint Services Command and Staff College (Defence Academy, Shrivenham). Her main research focus is on the Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe during the interwar period and the Second World War. In recognition of her PhD research, she was awarded the 2020 Royal Air Force Museum Doctoral Academic Prize in 2021.

Victoria also completed her Masters in Historical Research (MRes) on Britain’s wartime and post-war mythologization of Operation CHASTISE – better known as the ‘Dambusters raid’ – at Hull, for which she was awarded the Royal Air Force Museum’s RAF Centenary Master’s Academic Prize in 2019. She sits on the Editorial Board for the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Journal of Aeronautical History and has published with the Journal of Transport History; the Journal of Aeronautical History; the RAF’s Oranges & Lemons publication; and Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on two new books centred on her specialisations.

Victoria is an Ambassador of the Royal Air Force Charitable Trust and a ‘Spitfire Ace’ Ambassador with the National Spitfire Project, which aims to complete fundraising for the erection of a Spitfire monument in Southampton. She is also the official Project Historian for Spitfire AA810 - a cross-party initiative in the House of Lords to restore an original Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) Spitfire to the skies. She has served as an on-screen expert, assistant producer, historical consultant and narrator on airpower programming for the BBC, Channels 4 and 5, the Smithsonian Channel, History Hit, Sky History, National Geographic, the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund and beyond.

More information about her public-facing work can be found on her website: www.spitfirefillyaviation.com.

Research Interests:

• The Royal Air Force
• German Luftwaffe
• Interwar Period & Second World War
• Combat Experience & Morale (flying & non-flying arms)
• Political & Diplomatic History of War
• Operational Culture in Air Forces
• Ethics & Legality of Aerial Bombardment

Publications:

• Book due in May 2025 [subject & publisher contractually withheld]
• V. Taylor, ‘Winston Churchill’s Bombing Policy’, in A. Packwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Winston Churchill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp 316-341. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-winston-churchill/95D9CEE1B99C6C4F2366E4AE93D6DDE9
• V. Taylor, ‘Showing Our Wings: RAF and Luftwaffe Tensions at the July 1939 Brussels International Air Salon’, Oranges & Lemons (Royal Air Force publication), Autumn 2022, 13 - 23. Available online: https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/units/st-clement-danes-church/documents/o-l-issue-54/
• V. Taylor, ‘Fledglings of the Third Reich: The National Socialist Flyers Corps’, Journal of Aeronautical History, 01/2022 (April 2022), 1 - 28. Available online: https://www.aerosociety.com/media/18220/2022-01-fledglings-of-the-third-reich-taylor.pdf [Royal Aeronautical Society]
• V. Taylor, ‘Book Review: Fascism, Aviation & Mythical Modernity by Fernando Esposito’, Journal of Transport History: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022526621992026