Research

Alongside my freelance consultancy work, I am currently studying part-time towards my PhD in the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University, London.

The title of my PhD is ‘The thrill of the past: encounters with historical narratives of emotional experience at heritage sites from 1895 to the present’.

My thesis critically explores the ways in which how, in the Heritage sector, we often talk about spaces and places being receptacles for past emotions, where past actions appear to have seeped into the very stonework of a building or public space. But do places really retain the emotions or feelings of people who have inhabited them or have been connected to them; echoes of fear, love, power, greed and pain, a plethora of different ephemera? Throughout the 20th century people have visited heritage sites, stately homes, castles, battlefields, memorials and recounted experiencing ghostly apparitions, sensations of horror, empathy and being moved by the tears of others; a deep emotional connection with narratives that have an emotional resonance at their core.

I’m interested in taking a historical and chronological approach to the concept of connecting to how we have explained this concept of how a place retains the past emotions of those who have inhabited it. I will uncover, pick apart, put in a wider context and propose the contemporary implications for the ways in which people have expressed and represented this idea of having a ‘thrilling’ encounter at a heritage site throughout the 20th century.

You can find a summary of my research question in one of my recent blog posts.

Academic publications list

Participation in conferences and symposiums

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