Overview
Alice is an environmental archaeologist (and a 6th year PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Medieval Studies Program) working to understand the interactions between human society, plant ecology, and climate change in premodern Europe. Her dissertation uses archaeobotanical and ethnohistorical approaches to study agricultural weeds and weed ecology in northern England in the context of climate change and food-system transformation. Theoretically speaking, Alice's work as a disabled settler-allied scholar is grounded in Indigenous and Autistic approaches to epistemology, systems thinking, and historical ecology. Her thesis work at Smith College (A.B. Medieval Studies, 2015) and the University of Cambridge (M.Phil Archaeology (Archaeological Sciences), 2017) focused on early medieval British cereal cultivation and consumption. She has worked in England as an environmental archaeologist on Roman and medieval sites since 2013 and has worked on archaeobotanical assemblages from Europe, North America, and Asia. Alice is in absentia for the 2023-2024 academic year on a Junior Fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., where she will also be working as an unpaid Predoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.