Overview
Alice is in her 7th year in the Medieval Studies program. She is an environmental archaeologist and historian working to understand the interactions between human society, plant ecology, and climate change in premodern Europe. Her dissertation looks at weeds as a cultural concept and agroecological reality in northern England and northwest Europe more broadly over the past two millennia. 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 held a Junior Fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. during the 2023-2024 academic year. Her Fall 2024 FWS is Food in the Medieval World and she has previously taught courses on medieval gardens and medieval British archaeology. For her teaching efforts, Alice was awarded the Deanne Gebell Gitner '66 and Family Annual Prize in 2023.