Lauren Walden has a bachelor's degree in Modern and Medieval Languages (French and Spanish) from the University of Cambridge. Having gained linguistic fluency, her cultural interests broadened beyond literature and an interest in visual arts and cultural institutions emerged. This was initially met by a master's degree in Museum Studies at the University of Newcastle. There, she discovered she was more attuned to art-historical analysis rather than visitor surveys, quantitative analysis etc. Currently, she is lucky enough to have received a Special Exhibition Scholarship at Coventry University for a fully funded Phd in Art History. She is in her first year of Phd study. She is fortunate enough to be supervised by Professor Juliet Simpson in the research strand Art, Transnationalism and Cultural Memory. Her research elaborates a re-writing of surrealism's cultural memory as cosmopolitan. She views photography as enacting an empirically-lived cosmopolitan surrealism due to its indexical relation to the real.
