Chris Haffenden

Short presentation

I specialize in the cultural history of the nineteenth century, with research interests focused upon canonization, celebrity culture and the making of cultural memory.

In Every Man His Own Monument (2018) I examined the emergence of self-monumentalizing in the Romantic period. My current RJ project explores practices of self-erasure in nineteenth-century Britain.

I also work with digital research infrastructure at the National Library of Sweden, as research co-ordinator at KBLab.

Keywords

• memory studies
• media history
• history of celebrity
• canonization and reception history
• digital infrastructure
• ai and machine learning

Biography

I completed my doctoral project at this department in 2018. My educational background is from the UK, where I studied my undergraduate degree in History and English Literature at the University of Sussex, and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.

Since moving to Sweden, I worked for a number of years as a teacher of History and English Literature for the IB Diploma programme at various international schools, before resuming my academic studies in 2012. I have taught various undergraduate seminars and supervised essays relating to questions of canonicity and the “classic text” in intellectual history, as well as running diverse workshops on the use of AI methods in the humanities and social sciences.

Beyond conducting my current research project on the history of erasure, I also work part-time at the National Library of Sweden, as research co-ordinator for KBLab. This is a research infrastructure for large-scale research with a starting point in the national library's collections, where I can develop my interests in digital methods and the practicalities of making and using cultural heritage.

Research

My research interests focus on nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history, with particular emphasis on questions of canonization and the making of value. My work is interdisciplinary and intersects with a range of research fields, from Memory Studies and the History of Celebrity to Media History and Archival Studies. I am principally concerned with pursuing a material history of renown through the long nineteenth century; I explore the shifting configurations of material forms and cultural practices involved in producing claims to recognition in this period.

In Every Man His Own Monument: Self-Monumentalizing in Romantic Britain (Uppsala, 2018), I examined the emergence of a distinctive new set of practices for making immortality in the early nineteenth century. Using sociological and materialist frameworks, I identified these practices as part of a novel memory regime in which individuals rather than established authorities assumed responsibility for producing claims to lasting value. Offering new interpretations of well-known Romantic figures (the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the architect Sir John Soane, and the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon), my central argument challenged the tendency of previous research to examine either the present-centred renown of mass-media celebrity or the future-orientated prestige of the canon. Rather than celebrity and monument being antagonistically opposed, I showed them becoming closely entangled in this period through the legacy projects of self-made immortality. (If you are interested in reading more about this, my study is available Open Access here.)

Since completing my thesis I have been working on a new research project, entitled Self-erasure and practices of motivated forgetting in nineteenth-century Britain. Here I study the flipside of self-monumentalizing by exploring the efforts made by public figures to destroy those records of their lives they wished to conceal from future audiences. Focused on the burning of personal letters and diaries, I study the role of acts of motivated forgetting in the memorial regime of this period. Looking at how past individuals worked to shape their future erasure, I seek historical perspective for our contemporary dilemmas of remembering and forgetting. Together with Johan Fredikzon (KTH), I have published a broader methodological reflection on the possibilities of erasure as an object of study: "Towards erasure studies: Excavating the material conditions of memory and forgetting" in Memory, Mind & Media .