In 2014, a group of young Cambridge graduates with a shared ideal got together and began plotting…
They believed that historical research was meant to be shared with the wider public and, in an effort to break free of the Ivory Tower, they decided to create a blog. Thus, Doing History in Public was born.
Over the last ten years, the blog has published articles, interview, and the Advent Calendar, all written and edited by Cambridge graduates. 2025 marks the start of DHP’s second decade of life. In honour of this milestone, DHP has reinvented itself as an online magazine/blog committed to helping graduates in and around the University step into the wild world of public discourse. DHP is a friendly, welcoming space for students to launch their first articles into the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and get a taste of what it is like to bring academic rigour into the public sphere. We also publish interviews with the students of the Cambridge Faculty of History – a teaser of what the University is producing and where these brilliant new voices will take historical studies in the future.
Our team of editors work behind the scenes to polish articles and interviews to a high sheen. Our team comprises:
Editor-in-chief
Adam Pountney is a third-year PhD candidate in Modern British History at Christ’s College, Cambridge, researching the psychology of internment after 1916. Adam is especially interested in the intersection between medical, cultural and disability history, including the excavation of personal mentalities and worldviews through close reading of ego-documents and case files. He is also interested in the application of digital humanities and investigative methods to traditional analogue archives, including cross-referencing archival APIs with analogue print sources and catalogues. Adam also holds a continuing interest in media history using oral history interviews, institutional research and the use of preserved archival film and television.
Coordinating editors
Deguang Li is a third-year PhD researcher in History at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research takes the Great Comet of 1811 as a microhistorical lens through which to explore diverse practices of knowledge-making in London and Paris, tracing their material, social, religious and political dimensions. Her broader research interests lie in the cultural history of knowledge in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and its global connections, particularly how knowledge was produced, circulated, contested and transformed across different social and geographical settings. She holds an MA in Intellectual History and a BA in Comparative Literature from Tsinghua University and has also studied at Sciences Po Paris.
Yuetong Li is a final-year PhD candidate in History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Her doctoral research examines the popularisation of historical knowledge in Germany from the 1840s to 1914, asking how people outside the university came to know the past — through historical novels, museums and monuments, songs, school lessons, and local history societies — and who decided which past they encountered. More broadly, she works on historiography, the history of knowledge, and modern European intellectual and cultural history. She holds a BA from Sichuan University and an MA from Peking University, and also spent an exchange year at Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin.
Kendra Nydam is a third-year PhD student in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies (ASNC) at Queens’ College. Her research explores daughter-father kinship dynamics and their representation in literature of thirteenth-century Iceland and Norway. She holds an MPhil in ASNC from Cambridge, a BA in early English Literature and a BA in Digital Media Production from Dordt University, and was a visiting researcher at the Universitet i Oslo in 2025. Between her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, she spent three years teaching English Language and Literature at the secondary level. This experience, coupled with her background in film, has made public history and accessibility a key part of her research ethos and her work at DHP.
Lis Riveros is a second-year PhD candidate in Modern British History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she researches the English brewing and pub industry since 1939. Her doctoral thesis examines how business shaped political and cultural life in mid-twentieth-century Britain, focusing on corporate lobbying, relations between business and the state, party politics, and the Americanisation of British advertising and public relations. More broadly, she is interested in bringing corporate archives into conversation with cultural and social history, and in treating material culture, from pub architecture and interiors to advertising, as historical evidence.
If you would like to join our amazing team for the year 2026-27, or contribute an article / get interviewed, have a look at the ‘Get Involved‘ page to see what positions are currently open, and the links to submit proposals.
