Dr. Alison Bennett

Biography

Alison Bennett is a historian specializing in the British Empire with a particular focus on colonial history in Eastern Africa. Her research often employs cultural, visual, and material lenses to investigate the intersections of material and visual culture, imperial politics, and religion, particularly in Uganda. She earned her PhD from University College London, awarded through a Collaborative Doctoral Award in conjunction with the British Museum, where she studied the history of colonial ethnographic collecting in Eastern Africa. Currently, she is finalizing her monograph based on her doctoral research and has been awarded postdoctoral research fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Smithsonian Institution. Bennett has also worked closely with institutions such as the V&A and National Trust on topics including slavery and colonialism. She is an Associate Lecturer at Yale London and a Hallsworth Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester, where she explores the history of the Eastern African ivory trade in relation to the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Her project employs museum collections and archival research to trace the complex commodity chains of specific ivory objects to Britain, Germany, India, China, and the Middle East from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Research Interests