Marlowe McCaffrey

Project Title: Tracing scales: Rethinking biodiversity conservation and naturalcultural heritage in times of crisis through Lepidoptera conservation in Oxford.

This doctoral research project explores how different modalities of moth and butterfly - Lepidoptera - conservation in Oxfordshire can reconfigure ideas of biodiversity, scale, and naturalcultural heritage in the context of the current ecological crisis. Oxford is home to the world's oldest pinned insect and several vibrant Lepidoptera conservation communities.  Through multispecies ethnographic fieldwork with museum collections, citizen science networks, and digital conservation platforms, this project will examine how different agents - curators, volunteers, scientists, and moths and butterflies themselves - navigate and co-construct shifting meanings and practices of 'conservation'. In so doing, this research aims to trace how these human and more-than-human encounters generate new forms of environmental knowledge, participation, and memory, while rethinking the role of naturalcultural heritage in multispecies futures.

Marlowe is an anthropologist and social researcher currently reading for a DPhil in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, funded by the ESRC Grand Union DTP and St John's College. His research focuses on forms of conservation, heritage, and multispecies relationality, grounded in ethnographic engagement with natural history and biodiversity conservation practices.

He completed a BSc and MRes in Anthropology at UCL, graduating with First-Class Honours and Distinction, respectively. In 2020, he received the Rosa Morison Prize for achieving the highest overall grade in his cohort, was named to the Social and Historical Sciences' Dean's List in 2021, and in 2022 was awarded the Anna Sturm Law Fieldwork Prize for his MRes research on the sonic heritage and sustainability of steel pan in Trinidad and Tobago. His postgraduate studies were supported by the UCL Alumni Scholarship.

Beyond academia, Marlowe has worked across research, archiving and project management with organisations including Notting Hill Carnival, Google Arts & Culture, and the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab (UCL MAL). His broader interests include material culture, performance and sound studies, digital ethnography, and developing collaborative, cross-disciplinary methods.