Katherine Enright

Katherine is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History and the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. Her PhD is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership funded through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation project is about the politics, practices, and products of expeditionary science in the Malay Peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, with a focus on material culture. It explores the relationship between salvage ethnography, economic extraction, and the 'natural' sciences of zoology, botany, and geology. She is also keenly interested in curatorial approaches to colonial natural science collections in general, and to objects and artefacts from Cambridge-sponsored scientific expeditions to Malaya in particular. 

Before beginning her PhD, Katherine earned an MPhil in Digital Humanities from Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard College in History and Anthropology.

As a museum researcher, she has most recently worked on the curatorial team for the exhibition Measuring Difference (2024-2025) at Harvard University’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

She has also worked as a research assistant on an interdisciplinary biodiversity history project at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, at the China Biographical Database Project at Harvard University, and as a developmental and copy editor for academic monographs.

At Cambridge, she co-convenes the History of Science and Medicine in Southeast Asia Reading Group in the History and Philosophy of Science Department and is an affiliate of the University's Connections, Collections, Communities (CCC) research initiative.

Museum of Zoology