Helena Rutkowska

Research Topic

The First History of Elizabethan England: The Making of William Camden's Annals.

Helena is in her final year of an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP Studentship (Collaborative Doctoral Award) between the University of Oxford and the British Library. She is supervised by Dr Alexandra Gajda, Dr Neil Younger and Julian Harrison.
 

Her project focuses on establishing the authorship, sources and intentions behind the creation of William Camden's Annals, the first ever history of Elizabeth I’s reign, by studying the manuscript drafts of the work, currently held at the British Library. In 2023, thanks to a generous grant from the British Library Collections Trust, these manuscripts were digitised for the first time, where the use of enhanced imaging techniques revealed sixty-five pages of text that had been previously hidden for the past 400 years. This discovery and Helena's consequent research has been documented in the Guardian, ITV News, and other media outlets.
 

Helena is also a Graduate Outreach Tutor for the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, as well as a curatorial and interpretation assistant at Blenheim Palace (as part of the OOC DTP placement scheme).
 

Her main research interest has always been that of Classical Reception as is evidenced by her previous studies. She graduated with a BA degree in Classics from Durham University in 2017 and an MA degree in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture from the Warburg Institute in 2020. She has previously worked in heritage organisations such as the Florence Nightingale Museum and Handel Hendrix House, and is a regular volunteer at GLAM Oxford.

Supervisor: Dr Alexandra Gajda