Our reading group on 25 October 2024 focused on careers at heritage institutions, featuring guest speakers Alice Marples (British Library), Emily Roy (Bath Assembly Rooms/National Trust), and Zanna Van Loon (Museum Plantin-Moretus), who shared their insights on career paths in the heritage sector after completing a doctorate, as well as the challenges and opportunities within these institutions.

Alice Marples is Research and Postgraduate Development Manager at the British Library. In 2016, she obtained a PhD degree in Early Modern History from King’s College London and the British Library, working closely with scholars and curators at Queen Mary, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum on the AHRC-funded project ‘Reconnecting Sloane’. In 2017, Alice co-founded the Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies with a group of fellow postdocs at the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester. She is currently serving as the Heritage and Public Engagement Officer and the History of Science Reviews Editor for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Emily Roy is a Project Curator for the National Trust at Bath Assembly Rooms working on a major restoration project and the creation of a new visitor experience. In 2022, she obtained a doctorate from Cambridge University, working in the framework of the AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award between the Ashmolean and the University of Cambridge. Her research was based on 18th- and 19th-century printed views of St Petersburg from the Talbot Collection. Before, Emily worked as a Curator for Bristol City Council Museums and at Waddesdon Manor (National Trust and Rothschild Collections) where she held a range of curatorial and collections management roles.

Zanna Van Loon is the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Museum Plantin-Moretus. Her research interests include the materiality and sociality of the early printed book, book trade networks, and print culture. She previously worked as the expert on analytical bibliography and the project leader of STCV: The Bibliography of the Hand Press Book, the online and open access bibliography of early modern books printed in the Southern Netherlands. In 2020, she obtained a Ph.D. in Early Modern Book History at KU Leuven on the social and material characteristics of early modern missionary manuscripts and printed books on Indigenous languages of North and South America. In November 2024, her monograph on this research titled The Early Modern Production of Missionary Books on Indigenous Languages in New Spain and Peru will be published. She is a member of the editorial board of the Golden Compasses: Journal for Book History.

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