Emma is a Book & Paper Conservator working in the Conservation & Collection Care team at Cambridge University Library (CUL).
QEST funded the second year of her MA in Book & Archival Conservation at Camberwell College of Arts in London and enabled her to gain invaluable experience from internships at the V&A Museum, UCL Archives, Norfolk Record Office and the National Records of Scotland. She graduated in 2012 with distinction.
In the 10 years she has been at CUL Emma has worked with globally significant items spanning over a thousand years of history; Charles Darwin herbarium, Cairo Genizah fragments, WWII civilian internment archives, Indian mica paintings, and 15th CE incunabula; to name but a few.
Emma has featured in National Geographic and New Scientist magazines sharing CUL’s involvement in the collagen analysis of parchment manuscripts. In 2016 she was the first conservator to be awarded a Research Bursary by the Wellcome Trust to design a bespoke conservation treatment for moisture sensitive paper. In 2021 she created the ‘Darwin’s squeaky bean’ video which subsequently became a ASMR viral hit, and led to interviews with the BBC and Atlas Obscura.
