Cherish Watton
Cherish is a PhD student in Modern British History at Churchill College, Cambridge.
She studies the history of scrapbooks in Britain during the twentieth century, funded by the Wolfson Foundation.
Her thesis aims to use scrapbooks to interrogate broader histories of life-writing, archiving, collecting, gender, and emotions.
Cherish completed her BA and MPhil degrees at Cambridge. In 2018, Cherish won the Royal Historical Society's inaugural Undergraduate Public History Prize for her work running www.womenslandarmy.co.uk.
Cherish is regularly in the media discussing the work of the Women’s Land Army. Watch Cherish's interview on BBC Breakfast in the run up to the 75th Anniversary of VE Day here.
Gender history, material culture, public history, cultural history, and histories of subjectivities.
Online public history lecture for second-year undergraduate module on public history.
University of Birmingham, November 2018 and 2019.
For a list of Cherish's speaking engagements, click here.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Faculty of History, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9EF
Academic publications
Suffrage scrapbooks and emotional histories of women’s activism, Women's History Review (2022)
“Scrapbooks and community archives: WI women’s experiences of record-keeping in 1960s rural England.” Archives & Records (forthcoming, 2023)
Tiia Sahrakorpi & Cherish Watton, Coming of Age in Postwar Germany: Young Women’s Search for New Emotional Subjectivities, 1946–50, Journal of Social History, 2022
Public engagement
Women’s Land Army index card masterclass, Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, March 2023
Platinum jubilee: how Britain’s children captured the Queen’s coronation in scrapbooks 70 years ago, The Conversation, May 2022
The radical history of scrapbooks – and why activists still use them today, The Conversation, December 2021