Dr Katherine Howells

About

Katherine leads the Modern Britain team of record specialists in the Collections Expertise and Engagement department at The National Archives. She specialises in nineteenth and twentieth-century British visual culture and digital research methods and she focuses particularly on The National Archives' collections of photographs, government publicity and intellectual property records.

Research activity

Katherine holds a PhD in Digital Humanities and an MA in Early Modern History both from King’s College London. Her main research interest is in how historical images are remembered and reused in culture and society, and the impact of this reuse on people’s sense of identity and perception of the past.

Katherine's doctoral research focused on British cultural memory of famous propaganda posters produced by the government during the Second World War. This was part of a larger AHRC-funded project researching the publishing history of the Ministry of Information. Prior to this, she has explored the impact of photography and film in shaping the cultural memory of the First World War and how images, architecture and the heritage industry have influenced how British people imagine the Tudor period.