Chris Haffenden

Short presentation

I am an intellectual historian specializing in nineteenth-century cultural history. My research examines how memory, forgetting and subjectivity are shaped over time, especially through questions of canonization, celebrity and posterity.

My PhD focused on self-monumentalization in Romantic Britain. In a subsequent RJ project, I studied self-erasure and the traces that are preserved, restricted or withheld from posterity.

I work at the National Library of Sweden as Deputy Head of R&D and KBLab.

Keywords

• memory studies
• history of forgetting
• erasure studies
• nineteenth-century cultural history
• celebrity culture
• canonization
• digital humanities
• AI and cultural heritage

Biography

I received my PhD in History of Science and Ideas from Uppsala University in 2018, with a thesis on self-monumentalizating in Romantic Britain. My earlier education was at Sussex University, where I studied History and English literature, and Cambridge University, where I completed an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History.

My research concerns the history of memory and forgetting: how individuals and institutions have sought to control what is preserved, what is erased, and on what terms. Since completing my thesis, this work has developed towards self-erasure, archives and the material practices of forgetting, with a basis in nineteenth-century Britain and links to contemporary questions of data protection and digital subjectivity.

I have taught various courses in intellectual history and led methods workshops on AI and digital humanities for students, doctoral candidates and researchers in national and international contexts.

I am Deputy Head of the R&D and KBLab unit at the National Library of Sweden, where I work with digital research infrastructure, AI and method development for research based on library collections.

Research

My research interests concern the history of memory and forgetting, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history. Broadly speaking, I examine how individuals and institutions have sought to shape, control and limit future visibility: what is preserved, what is erased, and on what terms. My work moves between memory studies, the history of celebrity, archival studies and media history.

My thesis, Every Man His Own Monument: Self-Monumentalizing in Romantic Britain (Uppsala, 2018), examined self-monumentalizing in Romantic Britain. Through readings of Jeremy Bentham, Sir John Soane and Benjamin Robert Haydon, I showed how canonization and celebrity culture should not be understood as opposing phenomena, but as intertwined ways of managing public visibility and posterity.

Since completing my thesis, I have developed this research strand from the opposite direction. Rather than studying how people sought to be remembered, I have examined how they attempted to become partly forgotten. Through an RJ-funded project on self-erasure and the material practices of forgetting in nineteenth-century Britain, I have studied how writers and public figures destroyed or withheld personal documents from future readers: self-erasure as a protective strategy for controlling posterity and privacy.

Together with Johan Fredrikzon, I have formulated a broader theoretical framework for studying erasure as a research object in the article “Towards Erasure Studies”, published in Memory, Mind & Media in 2023. In later work, including an article on Frances Burney and the essay Självradering: Glömskans villkor in RJ’s 2026 yearbook Byråkrati, I have continued to examine the relationship between self-erasure, subjectivity and modern regimes of memory.

A related strand of my research concerns digital memory infrastructures. Through my work at KBLab, I have examined how AI and automated metadata change the conditions under which cultural heritage is organized, made searchable and used in research. Here, my historical interests in archives, visibility and forgetting connect with contemporary debates about data protection, the right to be forgotten and digital subjectivity.