My research explores how we experience and interpret cultural heritage, with a particular focus on manuscripts. I am interested in how encounters with material culture—whether physical, digital, or sensory—shape the ways people imagine, create meanings and understands of the past.
My doctoral research at the University of Leicester investigated how visitors respond to manuscripts when they are experienced beyond the traditional museum display. Through an experimental exhibition, I invited participants to engage with the material components of a manuscript using multiple senses – touch, smell, sound, taste and visual media – in order to explore how sensory encounters influence curiosity, imagination, interpretation and alternative ways of knowing.
This work reflects a broader interest in how museums, archives and libraries might rethink the ways they present collections. Rather than encountering manuscripts only visually through glass cases and written interpretation, I explore how material engagement, digital media and immersive environments can open up new interpretive possibilities and encourage deeper emotional and intellectual connections with the past.
At the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies, my work contributes to interdisciplinary discussions around digital humanities, heritage interpretation and the future of manuscript studies. I am particularly interested in collaborative projects that combine historical research with digital technologies and creative forms of public engagement, including initiatives exploring the digitalisation and reinterpretation of manuscript collections.
The LIAS Archives and Special Collections Fellowship has given me the opportunity to refocus on the biographical trajectory of MS210 (an Ethiopic manuscript c.17th/18th century) within the context of how embodied, sensory encounters afford imaginative, emotional meaning making and the space to think both about how digitisation impacts and expands the notion of object biography, and how this notion is entangled with and affects discussions around contested objects and repatriation.