Chris Haffenden

• Medarbetarportalen vid Uppsala universitet (kräver inloggning)

I completed my doctoral project at this department in November 2018. My educational background is from the UK, where I was born and brought up. I studied my undergraduate degree in History and English Literature at the University of Sussex, and have an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from 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 since taught various undergraduate seminars and supervised essays relating to questions of canonicity and the “classic text” in intellectual history.

Beyond initiating my new research project on the history of motivated forgetting, I also work part-time at the National Library of Sweden, as research co-ordinator for KBLab. This is a research infrastructure for datadriven research with a starting point in the national library's collections, and gives me the opportunity to develop my interests in digital methods and the practicalities of making and using cultural heritage.

Detta stycke finns inte på svenska, därför visas den engelska versionen.

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 my thesis, 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 self-made regime in which individuals rather than established authorities assumed responsibility for producing claims to lasting value. While 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 thesis is available via open access here.)

Since completing my thesis I have been working on a chapter that furthers these arguments, “’Immortality in this world’: Reconfiguring Celebrity and Monument in the Romantic Period,” which is due to be published in Celebrity Across The Channel, 1750–1850, ed. A. Pedron and C. Siviter (University of Delaware Press, 2020). I am also developing a new research project, provisionally entitled “’Eliminating all the traces’: Self-erasure and practices of forgetting in nineteenth-century Britain.” Here I aim to 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 will highlight the role of acts of motivated forgetting in the wider 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.