Ambivalent Archives

• Lauryn Anderson (PhD student, English, Jesus College)
• Claudia J. M. Cornelissen (PhD student, English, St John’s College)
• Daniela Meneses Sala (PhD student, Centre of Latin American Studies, St Catharine’s College)
• Ruari Paterson-Achenbach (PhD Student, Music, King’s College)
• Lucy Rogers (PhD student, English, Hughes Hall)

About the convenors

Lauryn Anderson is a PhD candidate in English, where she is writing a thesis on Anglophone literature variously known as ‘archival writing’ or ‘documentary writing’. This concerns literary work in the 20th and 21st centuries which engages with the concept of the archive, critically or sometimes physically, by repurposing documentary material within the written text. Lauryn has wider research and teaching interests in theories of documentary, documents and other kinds of ‘invisible literature’; collage, mixed-form and intertextuality; reading practices; photographic theory; postcolonial theory; and genre theory. At Cambridge, she also co-convenes the Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar and hosts the termly Contemporary Writers’ Readings series in the English Faculty. Her doctoral work is funded by a University Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. Follow Lauryn on Twitter

Claudia J M Cornelissen is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of English. Her research consists of a genealogical enquiry into feminist revisionism, the literary mode in which authors rewrite, subvert, or otherwise engage with canonical texts in order to highlight female voice and subjectivity. Her thesis looks at the emergence and evolution of feminist revisionist literature and considers questions of canonicity, politics, and the conditions of literary production. Claudia first became interested in archival studies while studying for her MSc in Gender at the LSE, where she worked on authors such as Saidiya Hartman, Avery Gordon, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Her wider research interests include feminist theory, contemporary literature, the role of narrative in social movements, postcolonial literature and theory, and cultural memory studies. Her work is funded by the Gates Cambridge Foundation.

Daniela Meneses Sala is a Peruvian PhD researcher in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research thesis presents several experiments on archiving our everyday feelings for pets in Lima, Peru, focusing on, among others, Speculative, Intimate, Creative and Activist Archives. This serves as a starting point to then explore what her proposed critical framework entails for wider issues related to Multispecies Justice and to the Environmental Humanities in general. Daniela holds an MSc in Gender from the London School of Economics, an MSc in Public Policy from University College London, and a Law Degree from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. She has published articles on topics such as anti-gender movements and gender and health policy during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is currently collaborating with Andrea Aramburu and Rachel Randall (University of Bristol) on a creative archival project intervening in a Peruvian photographic archive depicting wet nurses. Daniela also has a career in journalism, and previous to coming to Cambridge she worked both as a print and podcast editor in Peru, where she is originally from. Her doctoral work is funded by a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. Follow Daniela on Twitter

Ruari Paterson-Achenbach is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, currently a PhD candidate in Music at the University of Cambridge funded by the AHRC. Their work thinks about sound and performance as vehicles for memory, resistance and the radical potentials of social life. Through an intimate, affective engagement with Outsider Music, their PhD project hopes to uncover an alternative archive of sound, unveiling radical potential for creativity within and through non-normative social life. More broadly, their research interests include queer temporality, critical listening, creative anarchism, black feminist thought and decoloniality. Ruari was also a ‘New Creative’ and has produced works with and for the ICA, BBC and NTS Radio. They have performed in spaces such as Tate Modern, the London Contemporary Music Festival, Cafe OTO and the Heong Gallery. They love to find joy and beauty in the everyday. Follow Ruari on Twitter and Instagram

Lucy Rogers is a PhD candidate in English, whose doctoral research examines the role of women in the early development of ‘Cambridge English’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project tackles questions of professionalisation and disciplinarity, using both archival materials and published texts to re-evaluate the often unusual ways that female scholars engaged with this emerging academic subject. Lucy’s broader research interests include nineteenth-century novels (especially New Woman fiction); life writing; textual scholarship; intellectual history; history of education; and museum studies. She is a co-convener of the upcoming interdisciplinary conference ‘Women and Worlds of Learning in Europe: From the Medieval to the Modern Day’, to be held at the University of Oxford in Spring 2024. Her doctoral work is funded by a Jebb Studentship and a Sarah Squire scholarship. Follow Lucy on Twitter

Faculty advisors

• Geoff Maguire (Fellow in Spanish, Gonville & Caius College, Director of Studies, Emmanuel College, Director of Postgraduate Studies (MPhil and PhD), Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge)
• Peter McMurray (Associate Professor of Music, Director of Studies, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge)