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Staff Profile

Dr Kendra Packham

Research Associate

Background

Dr Kendra Packham received her B.A., M.St., and doctorate from the University of Oxford. She was a Research Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. She has also held visiting fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Her book project, Literature and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in Long Eighteenth-Century England, will break new literary and historical ground by recovering the forgotten category of election literature (including election plays, novels, and verse), and how this literature both reflected and helped to shape political culture, between the seventeenth century and the 1832 Reform Act. Key to this project is the recovery of important but now forgotten genres, such as the long eighteenth-century election play, and the literary and political significance of these forms. She is also preparing an edition of long eighteenth-century election plays.

She is completing another book focusing on literature, political memory, and cross-confessional and transnational exchanges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which uses extensive archival research and history of reading approaches to open new perspectives on the period’s literature and history.

She has co-written an essay that sheds new light on the mystery of how Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boleyn ended up in the Vatican Library, which was published in The Times Literary Supplement (TLS). The essay spans the Tudor period to the eighteenth century; England and Rome; and traces just some of the fascinating story of these extraordinary royal letters across space and time. She is currently co-writing a longer study on this topic.

Dr Packham is a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded digital humanities project, Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Cultural (ECPPEC). The project aims to produce new understanding of parliamentary elections in England between 1696 and 1832. This will include using digital techniques to connect materials and events produced by parliamentary elections across the long eighteenth century to evidence for actual voting in these elections, provided by contemporary poll books. For the project, she is particularly focusing on recovering, analysing, and recreating forms of electoral culture (items of print, manuscript, visual, material, and musical culture), and examining the links between different electoral interventions and political behaviour and participation.

Publications