Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Culture, English Literature, History, History of the book, Manuscript studies, Politics

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Dr Kendra Packham is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. 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., and she is a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University.

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.

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
08-Oct-2024	'The Humours and Narratives of Elections in the Eighteenth Century: An Online Exhibition Based on the Senate House Library Collections', IES: Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 8 October 2024. In eighteenth-century Britain, elections fought on party lines became highly visible. This was partly due to an outpouring of literature that reflected and fuelled the political process, including key commercial forms, such as popular plays and novels about elections. This literature reveals the wider landscape for the era’s famous visual satires, which also featured memorable characters and narratives, including William Hogarth’s series on the ‘humours’ of an election, and Thomas Rowlandson’s graphic prints on the Westminster election of 1784. These visual satires came to life in election plays that staged acts of bribery and treating, speeches from the hustings, canvassing, polling, and election ‘chairings’, for example. Contemporary popular politics fuelled literary creativity: for instance, by contributing satirical, emotive, comedic, and profitable subject matter to commercial theatre and the rise of the novel. Literature, in turn, had an important impact on elections. At a time when voting was heavily restricted, verse, drama, and prose encouraged political engagement across the social spectrum and across the country, giving voters and non-voters a voice, expanding the audience for politics, and helping to create a ‘culture’ of elections and electioneering. Literature also promoted diverse electoral narratives. This could include a view that elections were occasions for different kinds of ‘humour’: for ‘excessive’ passions and behaviour (fuelled by, for instance, political partisanship and alcohol) and also for ‘entertaining’, ‘amusing’ representations – a market for the ‘humours’ of elections that literary forms helped to shape and fuel. To mark 2024 as a historic ‘year of elections’, Dr Kendra Packham (Institute of English Studies, University of London) curates a new exhibition based on her book project, which uses Senate House Library’s rich collections to reveal how the links between the market for literature, and the market for representations of popular politics, energized both literature and politics in the period before democracy.
03-Jul-2024	‘Election Chairing Ballads: The Songs and Music of Electoral Victory from Handel to “Things Can Only Get Better”’, The History of Parliament Blog, 3 July 2024.
21-Jun-2024	‘Mapping and “Stage-Managing” Elections in the Long Eighteenth Century: Electoral Culture, Popular Politics and the Rhetoric of Political Space’, Historical Research, 97: 277 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 347–368. This article uses diverse forms of electoral culture – including newspapers and magazines, election plays and ballads – to recover an overlooked aspect of perceptions of political corruption in the ‘pre-Reform’ era: the partisan control of electoral space. These forms also present new perspectives on the political engagement of voters and non-voters, showing how perceived spatial corruption was actively exposed to public view. In the process, the article unearths a multimedia precursor to Hogarth’s famous series on the ‘humours’ of an election, which combines text, mapping and visual satire to challenge the legitimacy of an election result, and how the dynamic interplay between drama and electoral culture – including the contemporary puppet play – helped to popularize opposition to the ‘stage-managing’ of elections. Election ‘mapping’ affords new avenues into the eighteenth century as an age both of perceived corruption and of active challenges to that corruption.
05-Feb-2024	‘Election Plays and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in the Days of Dunny-on-the-Wold’, OUPblog, Oxford University Press, 5 February 2024.
26-Dec-2023	‘The Drama of Elections: Election Plays in the Long Eighteenth Century’, The Review of English Studies, 75: 318 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 30–47. This article breaks new literary and historical ground by recovering a rich but forgotten dramatic genre, and its literary and political significance: the eighteenth-century election play. It examines a range of plays which took contemporary elections as a key dramatic subject and setting—including a previously unexplored manuscript work which engages with the culture and politics of Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe—and argues that these plays open new perspectives on the period’s literature and politics, and the vital exchanges between them. Elections fuelled dramatic creativity and culture. Popular politics afforded profitable themes and occasions for comedy, satire, and heroic representations, supplying characters, settings, plots, and spectacle. Such plays, in turn, energized political culture. Election plays were circulated and performed not only when and where elections took place, and, although subject to forms of censorship, they encouraged active political engagement across the social spectrum and across the country in terms of their authors, audiences, and performers. Engaging with popular dramatic forms as well as popular politics, these plays popularized different perspectives, shaped by particular performances and conventions. They contributed to the conceptualization and commercialization of politics, fuelling a market for entertaining representations of the ‘humours’ of elections and a culture in which contested elections were seen as a key aspect of life and debate. At a time when the right—and opportunity—to vote for MPs was highly restricted, election plays both reflected, and helped to fuel and shape, an adversarial, far-reaching culture of elections and electioneering.
30-Jun-2023	Co-author of the Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture (ECPPEC) digital resource. Co-author of the award-winning AHRC-funded Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture (ECPPEC) digital resource, including curating a ‘virtual museum’ of electoral artefacts (the ‘Cultural Artefact Explorer’ <https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/cultural-artifact-explorer/>) and curating online exhibitions of electoral artefacts, including ‘The Soundscapes of Eighteenth-Century Elections’ <https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/features/the-soundscapes-of-eighteenth-century-elections-intro/>, a multi-media online exhibition involving a knowledge exchange collaboration with Nancy Kerr.
13-Jan-2023	(with Peter Lake, Michael Questier, and Estelle Paranque), ‘How did Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boleyn get to the Vatican?’, TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, No. 6250, 13 January 2023.
02-Dec-2021	(with Matthew O. Grenby), ‘Electoral Animals in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Stefanie Stockhorst, Jürgen Overhoff, and Penelope J. Corfield (eds.), Human-Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century: From Pests and Predators to Pets, Poems and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 147–164.
30-Aug-2020	‘Literature and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Review of English Studies, 72: 303 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 104–128. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the rise of contested elections as an important aspect of political life, and an outpouring of literary texts concerned to represent, and intervene in, the electoral process. This article recovers this rich, wide-ranging, and ideologically diverse genre, and argues that, interacting and overlapping with other forms, literature both reflected and helped to shape electoral culture. Popular literary varieties (from ballad opera to mock-heroic verse) were reworked to serve topical electoral purposes. This literature contributed to the culture of elections, making available particular, generically shaped representations and potentially increasing forms of electoral participation and partisanship. Like election rituals and other forms, literary texts encouraged engagement with elections among voters and non-voters. Indeed, through their formal qualities and modes of dissemination, literary texts could have pronounced power to engage varied audiences, and fuel a culture of contested elections, even when many seats were not contested and many could not vote. The election miscellany highlights links between election literature and regional printing, political, and literary cultures, and the growth of a market for this writing. At the same time, the authorship of election literature afforded diverse individuals a form of political expression and participation. Furthermore, the article considers the significance of the divergent, generically inflected views of candidates, elections, and the electoral activity of particular groups such literature advanced—for wider political culture, as well as specific elections. It proposes that texts from rousing ballads to vividly critical satires energized the divisions key to adversarial electoral culture, and could play into different calls for ‘reform’.
14-Mar-2019	‘Marvell, Political Print, and Picturing the Catholic: An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government’, in Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; paperback edition 2021), pp. 558–578. This chapter takes a fresh look at the formal and rhetorical techniques of a text that played a key role in Marvell’s reputation, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. Re-examining Marvell’s engagement with and contribution to political print culture, the chapter considers the Account’s connections with an earlier product of this culture—the ‘Parliamentarian’ history of John Rushworth—and how, in satirizing the Cavalier Parliament as an agent of ‘arbitrary government’, the Account made contact with a genre of ‘election literature’ which also exposed ‘affairs of state’ to wider scrutiny. Moving on to reconsider Marvell’s treatment of Catholicism, the chapter reviews new evidence for the Account’s afterlife in officially ‘anti-Catholic’ England, and suggests that this ‘anti-popery’ work offers a window onto a society in which different discourses about ‘the Catholic’ circulated openly, and could be adopted in response to particular political conditions.
01-May-2015	(Curator), ‘Literature and Electoral Culture in the First Age of Party Politics’ (Proscholium, Bodleian Library, 1 May–28 June 2015). Bodleian Library display based on Dr Kendra Packham’s British Academy-funded research project, and held during the period of the 2015 UK general election; the display used the Bodleian’s rich collections of rare books (including election plays, ballads, and miscellanies) and visual satire (including the work of Hogarth) to reveal how literary forms both reflected and helped to shape and fuel an active, adversarial, wide-reaching culture of elections and electioneering in eighteenth-century England.
01-Feb-2014	‘Praising Catholics “of low degree”: Literary Exemplarity, Popular Royalism, and Pro-Catholic Representations, 1660–1725’, The Review of English Studies, 65: 268 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 58–77. This article examines connections between praise and polemic, considering admiring depictions of Catholics who assisted Charles II after the Battle of Worcester (1651) in relation to efforts to promote positive constructions of Catholic identity in later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Exploring intersections between issues of religion, rank, and literary exemplarity, it argues that the appeal of ‘humble’ Catholic royalists as exemplars of the virtue of loyalty helped to ensure that favourable images of the Catholic could be found in contemporary printed texts. Rather than being passive victims, Catholics exploited the power of the press, and conventions of exemplary reading and writing, to advance pro-Catholic representations, even using these tactics to challenge Clarendon’s landmark History of the Rebellion (1702–1704). Furthermore, as texts ranging from Roger L’Estrange’s polemical dialogue paper, The Observator, to the ‘polite’ early eighteenth-century periodical, The Plain Dealer, suggest, these efforts were facilitated by the actions of Protestant authors and booksellers. The result was that, far from being inevitably demonized, Catholics could be recommended as examples to be imitated, in the very types of publication associated with the era’s burgeoning public sphere.

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