Polly Russell

• 1. Introduction

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  Polly Russell once received a stipend to spend a year researching food in Louisiana. That trip came long before she ever set foot inside the British Library as a curator. She now holds the title of food historian there, with responsibility for research on social science and food. Her path from a university lecture hall to a national archive ran through professional kitchens, a supermarket's research department, and a doctorate earned years later. How does a humanities graduate end up curating archival collections, working in professional kitchens, and later presenting a series on BBC television? That journey starts with the choices she made as a student, long before any of these titles applied to her.

• 2. Kitchens Before Curating

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  The University of Exeter awarded Polly Russell a first-class bachelor's degree in American and Commonwealth Arts, earned between 1990 and 1994. She followed that with a master's degree in journalism from Louisiana State University, completed by 1996.

  Back in the United Kingdom after her time abroad, Russell worked as a kitchen junior at two restaurants, The Carved Angel and Moro Restaurant. In July 1997 she joined Marks & Spencer, taking a role in product development. She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2003, then stayed on there as a research fellow until 2007. From 2003 onward she also worked as a freelance food writer and researcher. That combination of scholarly research and hands-on kitchen work would soon carry her into a very different kind of institution.

• 3. Archiving Women's Stories

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  Russell joined the British Library in 2007 as Lead Curator for Human Geography and Anthropology. A year later, in 2008, she moved into the role of curator in Social Sciences, a position she still holds.

  Among her projects at the library is Sisterhood & After, an oral history of the Women's Liberation Movement. She has also worked on the digitisation of Spare Rib magazine. That curatorial work sits alongside a separate life as a writer and broadcaster, one that reaches audiences well beyond the reading room.

• 4. Beyond The Reading Room

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  Since 2012, Russell has written The History Cook column in the FT Weekend magazine, part of the Financial Times. In 2015 she stepped into a new role, presenting the BBC television series Back in Time for... alongside Sara Cox.

  In 2018 she founded the British Library's annual Food Season, which she still curates today. Her written work also includes two books. The Kitchen Revolution, published by Ebury Press in 2008, promised a year of time-and-money-saving recipes and was written with Rosie Sykes and Zoe Heron. Welcome to London, a 2015 map subtitled A World of Eating and published by Herb Lester Associates, was made with Jenny Linford and Mikey Burton. Welcome to London appeared in 2015, the same year she first presented Back in Time for... on BBC television. That was the point where her work on the page and her work on screen briefly lined up.