Dr Lucy Razzall
- Role
- Researcher
Collections Researcher
About
Lucy specialises in the history of material culture and material texts. She is especially interested in material histories in and of the archive, histories of making, and environmental histories in the records of the state.
Lucy is the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, The Many Lives of Cardboard.
Research activity
Lucy previously held teaching and research positions at the University of Cambridge, UCL, and Queen Mary University of London. She has a PhD in early modern English Literature from the University of Cambridge.
After finishing her PhD, Lucy held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, California.
Lucy is Secretary of the Places, Plants, and People Archive Network.
Publications
‘“Piles of empty boxes”: Bureaucracy, Infrastructure, and Archival Materialities in the First World War’, in Objects in Distress, ed. Artun Ozguner (forthcoming: Bloomsbury, 2027)
‘“Their first matter”: Pasteboard Giants in Early Modern Writing’, in Literary Form After Matter 1550-1700: Experiments in Close Reading, ed. Katherine Hunt and Dianne Mitchell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026)
‘From Habitat to Service Equipment: The British Government Book as Container in “the Tropics”’, Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History (2025). This was co-written with Lora Angelova and Elizabeth Haines.
‘“Nothing but a thin painted Past-board”: Substance, Surface, and Paradox in Early Modern England’, in Waste Work: Early Modern Stories from the Cutting Room Floor, ed. Francesca Borgo and Ruth Ezra (Rome: Officina Libraria, 2025)
Boxes and Books in Early Modern England: Materiality, Metaphor, Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
‘Reliquary’, in Boxes: A Field Guide, ed. Susanne Bauer et al (Manchester: Mattering Press, 2020), pp. 597-606
‘Words in a Nutshell: Miniaturizing Text in Early Modern England’, in Miniature Books: The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Text, ed. Kristina Myrvold and Dorina Parminter (Sheffield: Equinox, 2019), pp. 45-54
‘‘‘Like to a title leafe”: Face, Surface, and Material Text in Early Modern England’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 8 (2017)
‘“Curious statues so cunningly contrived”: Plato’s Silenus, Inwardness, and Inbetweenness’, in The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement Between Worlds, ed. Paul Basu (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 232-49
‘Non intus ut extra: The Emblematic Silenus in Early Modern Literature’, Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, 22 (2016), 107-122
‘”A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit”: Recollecting Relics in Post-Reformation English Writing’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2 (2010)
Articles
-
Blog post
The Many Lives of Cardboard
In this blog, Lucy Razzall explores how The Many Lives of Cardboard project uses documents from our collection to trace the histories of this everyday material.
-
Blog post
The Ministry of Munitions and a surprise discovery in the archive
Finding a tiny object attached to some paper documents reminded me how the materiality of archives can connect us to the past.