Dr Alice Wickenden, Fitzwilliam
aw620@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
After coming to Cambridge for my undergraduate degree in English Literature, and staying on for an MPhil in Renaissance Literature, I moved to London to begin my PhD. This was an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between Queen Mary University of London and the British Library looking at Hans Sloane's library. Following this I worked at the Ruskin Museum and Library in Lancaster before taking up teaching positions at Durham University and the University of Edinburgh. During this time I also worked as a Research Assistant for two projects which combined botany and book history - the digital reconstruction of James Cuninghame's sheets of Chinese plant drawings (QMUL & Oak Springs Garden Foundation) and the CRASSH Cambridge Saffron project. I have returned to Cambridge as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow to begin the research for my next book project, which aims to theorise early modern library provenance.
Research Interests
The common thread across my research is an interest in how we think and read as scholars and how we might understand the historical, institutional, political, and ethical forces that act upon us as we do so.
My main research interests include the relationship between literature and heritage institutions, the relationship between early modern science and literary metaphors, the material culture of books, historical and sociological theories of early modern collecting... I am also interested in early modern drama, especially Shakespeare.
I also write creatively, and have published three poetry pamphlets and a longer work of creative non-fiction.
Selected Publications
Hans Sloane's Library Collection and the Production of Knowledge (forthcoming October 2025, Cambridge University Press)
‘The troubled histories of named collections within the British Library’, The Politics of Book History: Then and Now, a special issue of The Journal of Early Modern Studies ed. by Zachary Lesser and Georgina Wilson (forthcoming)
