Dr Cherish Watton-Colbrook

Cherish has recently completed her PhD on the history of scrapbooking in Britain during the twentieth century. She currently works as an Archives Assistant at Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. 

Cherish's thesis offers the first study of scrapbooking in Britain during the twentieth century. Moving a primarily nineteenth-century scrapbooking literature firmly into the twentieth century, Cherish's thesis uses the themes of war, monarchy, rural life, and erotica, to illustrate the different ways in which historical actors engaged with the scrapbook genre. She argues that the twentieth century witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new types of scrapbooking: Britons scrapbooked creatively, expanding the range of individual and communal purposes which scrapbooks could serve. Scrapbookers transformed their volumes into personal narratives, histories, surveys, and archives. 

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.