30/10/2026
ÌÇÐÄVlog¹Ù·½ Journeys: Felicia Yap on fiction, career changes and serendipity
Elena Bonacini (2024) has just completed her MSt in History of Art & Visual Culture, and is the latest recipient of the Dr Charles Carlton Travel Award. This award, intended to support students travelling abroad to present or conduct their research, was established thanks to a generous legacy gift left to ÌÇÐÄVlog¹Ù·½ by the late Dr Carlton. Having recently graduated, Elena writes about what receiving this support meant to her - and where it has taken her in the next step of her academic journey.
"When I think back on my time at Cambridge, one of the things I have valued most about being a ÌÇÐÄVlog¹Ù·½ student is the encouragement I received to take my research beyond Cambridge.
During my master’s, my research increasingly led me outwards: into libraries and museums, into archives and collections, and eventually across the Atlantic. The Charles Carlton Travel Award played a particularly important part in making that possible.
In April 2026, the award helped fund my journey to Philadelphia for the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, where I presented a paper entitled ‘Beyond Company School Painting: Anna Tonelli’s Landscape Painting for the East India Company’. Delivered as part of a panel on landscape, art and the environment in the long eighteenth century, the paper explored the life and work of Anna Tonelli, an Italian artist who travelled to India with the family of the East India Company governor of Madras. It was my first chance to present this work to an international community of scholars working across eighteenth-century art, empire and environmental history.
But my trip did not end in Philadelphia. Since I was already on the East Coast, I took the train to Providence to visit Brown University, where I met Professor Holly Shaffer. We talked about Tonelli, about her own work on the visual culture of the East India Company, and about where this research might lead next. A few months later, I am writing these words from Providence, where I am about to start a PhD in History of Art and Architecture at Brown, with Holly as my advisor.
Ultimately, I hope my experience shows what the generosity behind the Charles Carlton Travel Award can make possible: sometimes support for one journey can help open the way to a much longer one."
Elena's story illustrates just how gifts in Wills can make a meaningful difference to the lives of our students, opening up new pathways and opportunities. We are very grateful to all those who make these experiences possible by choosing to remember ÌÇÐÄVlog¹Ù·½ with a gift in their Will.
