Parnian Ferdossi

Thick Archives: Spatiality and the Digital Reconfiguration of the House of Albums

Parnian is a DPhil student in Geography and the Environment, supervised by Professor Gillian Rose and Professor Kathryn Eccles (Oxford Internet Institute). Her research examines how photographic archives are organised, controlled and circulated through digital systems, and how these processes affect their use as ‘historical evidence’.

Her research grew out of the recent online circulation of digitised photographs from the Album Khāneh at Golestan Palace Museum in Tehran, Iran, after decades of restricted access. Images were separated from their album contexts, which led her to consider the risks facing cultural heritage in Iran and elsewhere. Her work considers the vulnerability of digitised collections to disruption, including data leaks and cyberattacks, and what this means for data governance and responsible reuse in multimodal systems.

Parnian’s background spans photography, teaching, documentary production and archival research. She has most recently worked with photographic collections at the Royal Geographical Society and the Warburg Institute, where she contributed to digitising and cataloguing Persian materials. She holds an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Photography from the University of Tehran.