Hannah Mawdsley completed her AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD studentship, ‘Politics of Commemoration and the ‘Forgotten’ Pandemic’, in 2019.
A partnership between Imperial War Museums and Queen Mary, University of London, Hannah examined the evolving memory of the 1918-19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic, and used that calamitous event as a case study to interrogate the politics of commemoration.
Hannah’s key source was a collection gathered by British historian and journalist Richard Collier for his 1974 book The Plague of the Spanish Lady: The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which he deposited at IWM after the book’s publication.
Hannah also wrote an article about Spanish Flu for the IWM website, drawing upon oral histories.