Unlocking History, King's Undergraduate Research Fellowship

Letterlocking, MIT Press, 2025 — Jana and Daniel's recently published monograph.

After finishing my undergraduate degree, I was lucky to work with the ‘Unlocking History’ project as a King’s Undergraduate Research Fellow. I worked with conservator Jana Dambrogio and literature scholar Daniel Starza Smith, assisting in their project on letterlocking — how people constructed letter packages prior to the industrialisation of the envelope.

The three-month fellowship was my first experience with material culture studies. I contributed to theory-building meetings, worked with the Paston letters at the British Library and material at the National Archives, and learned to construct speculative simulacra to help interpret archive examples.

Jana and Daniel published their book via MIT Press in 2025, to which they graciously added a note acknowledging our conversations attempting to define damage. I reconnected with Jana at the Oxford launch of the book, and continue to be grateful to the project for supporting my first steps into research.

Tomas Brown at the end of the Unlocking History fellowship, holding one of his letterlocking simulacra — Me at the end of the project, with one of my simulacra.