Clare Hall PhD student in History Adèle Wright has been named a runner-up in the University of Cambridge’s 2026 ‘Snapshots of Doctoral Success’ competition, organised by the Postgraduate Researcher Development team.

The annual competition invites doctoral researchers from across the University to capture and communicate what doctoral success means to them through photography and creative reflection. Entries highlight the diversity of postgraduate research experiences, showcasing both academic work and the personal journeys that shape it.

Adèle’s shortlisted entry, ‘Stained‘, combines photography, poetry, and archival research to explore the legacies of colonialism embedded within museum collections. Her work draws on her doctoral research into Oceanic material culture held in the collections of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), alongside her professional practice as a Paintings Conservator.

The piece centres on a nineteenth-century arrow from Vanuatu, layered with the museum’s catalogue entry for the object. Through a process of digital erasure and revelation, Adèle created an erasure poem that reflects the central themes of her thesis.

Adèle explains:

“What is this? you ask. It is an erasure poem called ‘stained.’ I created it by layering my 2021 photograph of a nineteenth-century arrow from Vanuatu, an archipelago in Oceania, on top of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology online catalogue entry for this object (1907.86). After digitally concealing the institutional text, I revealed certain words by erasing parts of the photo, and thus created the poem.

“So what?, you demand. I can hear your eyes rolling. You are wondering how this represents doctoral success, after all, isn’t that the point of the competition?

“I have been a part-time PhD student in History for many years, studying Oceanic material culture from the ‘long twentieth century’ in the Cambridge MAA collection alongside my work as a professional Paintings Conservator and mother. This photo represents my recent attempts to bridge the chasm between Oceanic research methodologies and the Academy. Poetry has become my method to access and express sensory, material, and more-than-human epistemologies. This poem distils the central argument of my thesis.

“The knowledge of how to make this arrow died with the decimation of Indigenous populations through the colonialism of disease and the unfree labour trade. Museums like MAA are the beating heart of colonialism. They are stained. This arrow has the potential to silence the beating heart, or at least to make it pause. The arrow does not speak with Indigenous voices, but through attention to them, their material processes of staining and becoming stained, Indigenous lives assert their history.

“Even if the arrow is stained ‘Cambridge Blue’, the colour could be redefined as a hopeful springtime green that persists despite the legacies of colonial violence.

“Thank you to the Postgraduate Researcher Development team at Cambridge for recognising my work and awarding me a runner-up position in this competition. It is a real honour.”

Congratulations to Adèle on this recognition of her innovative and interdisciplinary research.