Rebecca Kahn
PhD Student
Email rebecca.kahn@kcl.ac.uk
Digital Humanities
King’s College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London
WC2B 5RL
Title
tbc
Supervisor
Professor Andrew Prescott
Research
Rebecca’s research examines the role of library and archive collections as active players in the development of national identity. Via the process of digitisation and online distribution, national libraries are able to extend their agency beyond the material walls of their institutions, and share their constructed identities with wider audiences. Looking at societies where national identity is regularly interrogated, her research examines the processes whereby identity is constructed in the digital and public space and questions the role of memory institutions in cementing selected, constructed national identities in digital collections.
Biography
Rebecca Kahn completed her undergraduate degree at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and spent several years working as a journalist and editor based in Johannesburg before moving into the digital public space. She has also worked for Creative Commons, iCommons and the African Commons Project, as well as collaborating with the Wikimedia Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation and other open source and free culture organisations.
A previous MA, conducted as part of the Public Intellectual Life Project at the University of the Witwatersrand examined the role of the South African media’s representation of Afrikaans punk music in the development of identity and the public debate in South Africa.
At Kings, her MA Digital Asset Management research examined the role of digital library collections in representing national identity in postcolonial, multiethnic societies.