Ali Macdonald

Post Doctorate Fellow

Alexandra is an historian of material culture, labour, and the body. She is particularly interested in embodied knowledge and practices of making in the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As part of her research, she is interested in using period specific ingredients and methods to recreate historical crafts (dyes, pigments, varnishes, etc). Alexandra has received a number of fellowships to support her research. Most recently she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library where she worked closely with conservation scientists to recreate indigo vats using historic recipes and to analyze a canvaswork embroidery made in Connecticut in the mid-eighteenth century. During her time at Brock she will be working with Dr Jessica Clark on her second project which brings together methods from sensory history, material culture studies, and studies of labour and the body to examine the entangled and often fraught history of indigo and other dyestuffs in the eighteenth and nineteenth century British world.