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Dr Kendra Packham is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London (UCL). 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 then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. She has held research fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. She was a Senior Research and Innovation Associate, and is a Visiting Fellow, at Newcastle University. She was a first-generation university student.

Her groundbreaking research project, supported by fellowships from the British Academy and Wadham, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Institute of English Studies and UCL, recovers 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 in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. Her innovative publications from this research project include two articles in The Review of English Studies: ‘Literature and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in Eighteenth-Century England’ (2020), and ‘The Drama of Elections: Election Plays in the Long Eighteenth Century’ (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 completing a book, Literature and the Creation of a Culture of Elections and Electioneering in the Long Eighteenth Century, and she is preparing an edition of election plays. She curated a Bodleian Library display on this research during the 2015 UK general election, and her research on 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 on her research project using the rich literature and art collections of Senate House Library.

She is an expert on literature, political culture, and cross-confessional and transnational exchanges and experience in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century. This includes an interest in different historiographical discourses, representations and traditions, and how these were received, as well as how these were popularized, adapted and deployed through a wide variety of forms. Her innovative work in this field has appeared in The Review of English Studies (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (2019; paperback 2021) and a co-written essay in The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) (2023), and she is currently completing a book-length study. Her article with Michael Questier on Henry VIII’s letters to Anne Boleyn, the Vatican Library, and historiography is forthcoming in The English Historical Review.

Dr Packham helped to develop, and was part of the project team on the research grant application for the award-winning AHRC-funded digital humanities project, Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture. As co-author of the project digital resource she, for example, curated the resource’s ‘Cultural Artefact Explorer’ (a ‘virtual museum’ of electoral artefacts) and its 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. She is jointly editing an essay collection on electoral culture, with Elaine Chalus and M.O. Grenby. She helped to develop, and was part of the project team on the research grant application for the AHRC-funded project to create a new online resource based on Hogarth’s series of election paintings, in collaboration with Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. As co-author of the Sir John Soane’s Museum Explore ‘An Election’ online resource (2026) she, for example, selected and scripted for educational animations of the paintings, a number of the ‘characters’ (for instance, the violin player ‘Fiddling Nan’; the visual-satire-within-a-visual-satire ‘Punch, Candidate for Guzzledown’; the Ballad Singer) and also adapted from Hogarth the overall ‘plots’ for Paintings 3 and 4, The Polling and Chairing the Member; she selected and abridged the songs and music to be performed by the characters in the paintings and available to play in the ‘Notes’ (for example, drawing on her research on actual election ballads from the Oxfordshire election of 1754) and was the historical adviser to Nancy Kerr on these musical pieces; she was lead author of the accompanying collaborative Teacher Information Pack; she was co-author of the annotations/’Notes’ on the paintings.

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