Snapshots of Doctoral Success: 2026 Winners

We were thrilled to receive so many entries illustrating your doctoral 'wins'. After much deliberation by the judging panel, our three final winners are as follows:

Winner: 'Finality' by Anna Mika, Department of Archaeology

"This photo marks the remnants of the very last experiment from my PhD. It was a moment of relief, but also of quiet sadness that it was over. Months of late-night preparations, of meeting and getting to know my participants, and hours of setup had all led to this. My PhD has been a journey marked by challenges and delays but, in this moment, none of that mattered. There was just the bittersweet feeling of months of physical and emotional labour coming to an end."

Runner up: 'New Horizon of Discovery' by Alicia Anderson, Department of Physics

"This image was taken when I was working at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Canary Islands for field work related to my PhD. The main subject is one of the 17-metre MAGIC telescopes designed to detect very high-energy gamma rays."

"These telescopes operate at the frontier of astronomy, probing a regime of electromagnetic radiation inaccessible to any other facility in the world, unlocking new information about the universe. The fading light of the setting sun mirrors the transition in this new age of science of discovery: may the setting sun mark the end of our current limitations and the beginning of a new horizon of discovery that inspires our search to understand the universe."

Runner up: 'Stained' by Adèle Wright, Faculty of History

"What is this?, you ask. It is a poem about beauty, skill, danger and loss, I reply. Ceci n’est pas une flèche. But what IS this?!, you exclaim. I feel your confusion and attempt to explain. It is an erasure poem called ‘stained.’ I created it by layering my 2021 photograph of a nineteenth-century arrow from Epi in Vanuatu on top of the MAA online catalogue entry for this object (1907.86). After digitally erasing the institutional words, I did some additional erasure to reveal certain words and thus create the poem."

"So what?, you demand (as many PhD supervisors have done before you). I can hear your eyes rolling. The pale green coating on the shaft of the arrow disappearing into a distant blur (or blurb) was applied in order to help identify this arrow as poisoned for the ni-Vanuatu bowman who intended to use it. When I examined this arrow in the museum I found that the dark lines in the lower right corner of the photograph mark the exact balance point of the arrow. The arrow is composed of three progressively more dense materials: bamboo, wood and bone. It was only through handling the arrow from my privileged position that my body felt the balance of its body and understood the Indigenous literacy present in this object."

"You are not yet convinced and wonder how this represents doctoral success. Although the above was an interesting embodied discovery, it is the transformation of my photograph in 2026 that I wanted to showcase. It was this academic year that I decided to try to bridge the gap between the Indigenous worlds I could sense through the material culture I was studying in the MAA and the media I used to record, analyse and represent those experiences. Academic writing could not achieve this alone. I was inspired by Indigenous Oceanic researchers to explore poetry as a research method. Scouring the catalogue entries, card indexes, labels and archival sources for poetry is my new method for creating the research as well as structuring and representing it within my chapters. Through creating this poem, I have distilled what I believe is the central argument of my thesis."

"You nod and smile. Am I explaining too much? This arrow is lost to those who made and used it in Oceania. The ancestral knowledge of making processes has also died with the decimation of the Indigenous populations through the colonialism of disease and the labour trade. Museums like MAA are the beating heart of colonialism. They are stained. Poison. This arrow has the potential to silence the beating heart, or at least to make it pause. Objects in the museum are stained by Cambridge through their very materiality. For example, oxygen from the Cambridge air reacts with the plant fibre and paint media causing chemical and physical changes. The objects do not speak with Indigenous voices, but through attention to them - their material processes of staining and becoming stained – Indigenous lives assert their history."

"Do you like that? Perhaps you are reserving judgement. You gently remind me that PhDs are supposed to take 3 years, 4 if you want to take a breath. How can you celebrate success when you have been here since before we had even heard of Covid-19? Yes, I admit, I have been a PhD student for some time. But perhaps what makes this photograph more meaningful is the personal journey of way-finding through part-time work, pregnancy and motherhood (twice over) since I began this project. The end of the arrow (and my PhD) is not quite in sight, but perhaps the 'blue' of Cambridge is more of a flourishing springtime green?  I have made several other erasure poems and hope to make more as I continue my research."

"Show me!, you say. Oh, I hoped you would say that!"