Awards

Alexandra Hewitt

My research specialisms are social history, buildings history and material culture (object history). I focus on social identity, thinking about how people used their homes to construct and display their status. This research takes me all over – to heritage sites and museums, as well as libraries and archives.

I recently finished my PhD thesis which examined social identity and interior decoration in the 1500s and 1600s. As part of this project, I reconstructed the interiors of William Shakespeare’s lost townhouse, New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon (1597-1616). I used this reconstruction as a tool to explore how people like Shakespeare used their homes in the complex process of self-fashioning. 

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Research Experience

Research Associate
AHRC-funded Middling Culture Project
(2021 – present)
I am a Research Associate on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort. My research focuses on public and digital engagement, and involves work with a number of cultural partners. See previous projects for more information on this role.

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PhD
University of Birmingham
(2017 – 2022)

Thesis title – ‘Shakespeare’s self-fashioning: social identity and the interiors of the ‘new gentry’ house in early modern England, 1590-1620.’

My project analysed the relationship between interior decoration and the social identity of the ‘new gentry’ in early modern England. It did so through a reconstruction of the interiors of New Place: William Shakespeare’s townhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon from 1597 until 1616. This reconstruction is based on the in-depth analysis of surviving material in comparable urban buildings. My study relied heavily on data gathered from extensive archival and museum collection research, as well as fieldwork in the form of research trips to extant early modern properties. My thesis, therefore, studied other extant buildings to address a significant but challenging case study.

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Community Engagement Researcher
The Museum of London
(2019)

Project title – Shifting Practices: contemporary collecting and communications.

This research project was created by the Museum of London to explore the space between communications and engagement. The aim was to examine how the boundaries may be shifting as MoL moves into a new way of co-curation and contemporary collecting, helping to understand the systems, structures and skill sets that might be needed in the future. The main focus of this project was collaborative and community collecting, and how digital platforms might help facilitate this process. To understand more about the role of digital in this form of collecting, this study developed a number of case studies and looked outside the museum to see how external organisations collect content and engage communities through crowdsourcing activities. The findings and suggestions from this research project are drawn from these case studies and will help inform the future delivery of projects such as Curating London, as well as the development of future organisation-wide operating models as MoL move towards the New Museum of London.

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MA, Renaissance, Reformation and Early Modern Studies
University of Birmingham
(2013 – 2014)

Dissertation – ‘An analysis of the meaning and significance of the decoration in the Great Chamber at Chastleton House, Oxfordshire’.

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BA (Hons), History and Political Science
University of Birmingham
(2010 – 2013)

Dissertation – ‘A study of the cultural implications of the Reformation under Elizabeth I through an analysis of funeral monuments and portraiture’.