Hello, I'm Henrietta
I love people, museums and the polar regions. As a museum anthropologist, I am interested in the people who work at, go to visit, and are put on display in museums. As a polar specialist, I consider what life is like (and what it was like in the past) for people who live and work in both the Arctic and Antarctic. I have been fortunate enough to combine these interests in my working life for nearly a decade.
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I have worked in a variety of roles in museums across Canada, including as Assistant Curator at the Itsanitaq Museum in Churchill, Manitoba, also known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Having successfully managed not to be eaten by a polar bear, I then spent several years working at the Polar Museum, part of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Here I curated a number of exhibitions including leading a co-curated exhibition on climate change, working with 12 teenagers from across the UK. It was also at the Polar Museum that I learned more about the Antarctic and eventually I wrote my doctoral thesis on Scott, Shackleton and the other men of the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration. My research identified all the many other people, objects and organisations that helped to enable these famous men on their expeditions, and which ensure that we still remember them in museums today.
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I have worked as a freelance curator with a range of organisations including Story Machine and the Cambridge Corn Exchange and am a confident public speaker and accredited lecturer for the Arts Society.
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I am available for curatorial work, academic research, polar consultancy and public speaking.
My research
My research considers museum collections related to the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration – a period generally regarded as running from the late 19th to the early 20th century – and the British explorers of this period. I ask how shifting socio-political contexts have informed the categorisation of certain figures as ‘heroic’; led to the objects of Antarctic exploration being accessioned into museum collections; and enabled museums to perpetuate ‘heroic’ thinking through their collections. Revealing these entangled histories exposes the ongoing visible and invisible power plays that have been enacted on museum collections over time.
