Staff Profile

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

Her current book project breaks new literary and historical ground by recovering the rich category of election literature – including plays, novels, and ballads about elections – and how, interacting and overlapping with other forms (such as visual satire, including the work of Hogarth and Rowlandson) literature both reflected and helped to shape and fuel an active, adversarial, far-reaching culture of elections and electioneering, between the seventeenth century and the 1832 Reform Act. Her publications from this project include ‘The Drama of Elections: Election Plays in the Long Eighteenth Century’ in The Review of English Studies (2023), which brings to light the forgotten genre of the long eighteenth-century election play, and a previously unexplored manuscript play-text that creatively engages with Daniel Defoe’s famous novel, Robinson Crusoe. She is also preparing an edition of election plays. She curated a Bodleian Library display based on this research during the 2015 UK general election, and her research on eighteenth-century election ballads and ‘chairing’ songs featured on the BBC Radio 3 programme Saturday Morning presented by Tom Service in the run-up to the 2024 UK general election. To mark 2024 as a historic global 'year of elections', she curated an online and physical exhibition based on her book project using the rich literature and art collections of Senate House Library.

Dr Packham is also actively engaged in research on literature, politics, and cross-confessional and transnational exchanges and experience in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century, including completing a book-length study. Her innovative work in this field includes a co-written 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), and she is currently co-writing a longer study on this topic.

She was a Research Associate on, and before this helped to develop, the award-winning AHRC-funded digital humanities project, Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture (ECPPEC). This included recovering, curating, and recreating forms of electoral culture (items of print, manuscript, visual, material, and musical culture) for diverse audiences: for example, she curated a ‘virtual museum’ of electoral artefacts (the ‘Cultural Artefact Explorer’) and online exhibitions of electoral artefacts, including ‘The Soundscapes of Eighteenth-Century Elections’, a multi-media online exhibition involving a knowledge exchange collaboration with Nancy Kerr.