Collaborative Doctoral Projects offer a PhD candidate the opportunity to work with an external partner on a project devised jointly by the organisation and the university. In this blog, Hannah Dennett highlights her experience of curating an exhibition with the Foundling Museum, as part of her PhD project to uncover the lives of African and Asian children taken into London’s Foundling Hospital during the long eighteenth century.

The records of the eighteenth-century Foundling Hospital in London reveal an untold part of its history – that of the presence and experiences of Black, brown and mixed-race infants cared for by the charity. In this blog post, Hannah Dennett shares the first findings of her collaborative PhD project based at Warwick and the Foundling Museum. Her research to date has already revealed more incidences of children of colour being admitted into the Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century than anticipated it would be possible to discover. As she demonstrates through the case of Mary Carne and her infant son born in 1798, the lives of these foundlings, no longer forgotten, are important for shaping a more complete history of the Foundling Hospital.