The History Department is delighted to welcome new Social Science and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow Alexandra (Ali) Macdonald. She comes to us from the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia), where she recently completed her Ph.D.

Dr. Macdonald’s research focuses on material culture in the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her scholarly interests, which draw on her background in both history and art history, include using period-specific methods and ingredients (such as original dyes and pigments) to recreate historical crafts. She has received various fellowships to support her work, including a recent postdoctoral fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library (Winterthur, Delaware) where she worked with conservationists to recreate indigo vats and analyse embroidery made in Connecticut in the eighteenth century.

During her two-year postdoc at Brock (January 2025 to December 2026), Dr. Macdonald will work with Dr. Jessica Clark on a project that draws on multiple research methods – the history of the senses, material culture studies, and the history of labour and the body – to examine the complex and often fraught history of indigo and other dyestuffs in the eighteenth and nineteenth century British world. The project is entitled “Imperial Sensorium: Bodies, Industrialization, and the Dye Industry, 1750-1850.”