Dr Alice Wickenden

IASH Affiliate 2023-24
Dr Alice Wickenden

Dr Alice Wickenden is an Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow in Early Modern Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Having completed a collaborative PhD between Queen Mary, University of London and the British Library, her first monograph, Library Objects: Hans Sloane and the Boundaries of Book Collections, is currently in process with Cambridge University Press: this looks at the library collection of Hans Sloane (1660-1753) in the context of his wide collection, asking where we draw the line between ‘book’ and ‘object’. She is currently working on a project exploring the colonial histories of named library collections. She has further research interests in the relationship between early modern botany and literature and has worked as a research assistant on projects about eighteenth-century Chinese plant drawings and on the history of Cambridge saffron; an article on John Ray and Milton’s Paradise Lost was awarded the Royal Society’s Notes and Records runner-up prize for 2023. She has previously taught at Durham University and Queen Mary, University of London and has also published poetry and nonfiction with Nine Pens (how to decode your orange-peel fortunes, 2022) and Broken Sleep Books (THRIFTWOOD, 2022).

What do libraries do about their difficult pasts? Whilst the public, practitioners, and scholars of museum studies have all begun to think about the colonial histories of museums, these conversations do not easily translate to library spaces. My current research offers a way forward by centring the named collector of rare books. Rare books are frequently catalogued under the names of their collectors, and institutional presentations value the material traces of them. Annotations, cuttings-out, pastings-in, and other interactions with the space of the page have all been significant features of the ‘material turn’ in early modern studies and book history. By combining historical and material analysis of collected items with a focus on institutional presentation, metadata, and cataloguing systems, I aim to create a framework to think not only about the impact and legacies of the past, such as slavery, but also about the role such collections will play in the future given the realities of climate change.