Postdoc, Faculty of Humanities

Intro

Alexandra (Ali) Macdonald is a 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.

What does your postdoc research focus on?

During her time at Brock, Alexandra 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. She is also currently working on an experiential history project where she is growing flax at the Brown Homestead using historic materials and methods. Her hope is that over the course of her postdoc, Alexandra will be able to go from flax (seed) to linen, growing, harvesting, processing, spinning, and weaving a sample of linen that can be dyed using both local and global natural dyes.