Home / Staff / Dr Alison Bennett

Dr Alison Bennett

Director of the Undergraduate Diploma in the History of Art

Departmental Lecturer in Art History

ali.bennett@conted.ox.ac.uk

https://bsky.app/profile/alibennett.bsky.social

Dr Ali Bennett is a lecturer in global art history. Before joining the University of Oxford, Ali held lecturing and research positions at the University of Manchester, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale in London), the University of Lincoln, and the University of East Anglia. She was also a research associate for the East India Company at Home project.

Ali completed her PhD in 2018 with an AHRC Award from UCL History and the British Museum. Her thesis analysed Uganda’s political past through objects housed across museums in Britain, East Africa and the USA. Her research has taken her to museums and archives in Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar, and Washington DC. She is now developing her thesis into a manuscript.

Before joining academia, Ali had a career in the museums sector, working for the V&A. She has also served in advisory roles for the National Trust and the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent.

Ali enjoys working directly with objects and archives in her teaching, often drawing on works from across Oxford’s rich collections, including those from the Ashmolean and Pitt-Rivers museums, and the Weston Library. She has taught with collections ranging from Pissarro’s impressionist works to medieval and renaissance ivories from around the world at the Pitt-Rivers Museum.

Ali’s research examines the intersections between material culture, visual art and the British Empire, with a focus on eastern Africa. She has a wide variety of interests including global commodities and their historical visualization, the entangled religious material cultures of Africa and Britain, and histories of museums and collecting in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Her current research project is on the history of the nineteenth century global ivory trade.

Articles

‘Ivory Warehouses Global Commodities, and Material Skill development: A Study of the Ivory Warehouse in the Port of London c. 1860–1968, Industrial History Review (November 2025)

‘Objects of Conversion: Catholic Missionaries and the Miraculous Medal in East Africa’, History of Religion in Africa, 51:1–2 (2021), pp. 27–64

‘British Material Diplomacy in Precolonial Uganda: The Gift Exchanges of John Hanning Speke, 1860–1863’, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 16 (February 2021), pp. 166–174

‘Collecting Uganda: Rethinking Colonial Politics through Objects’, History in Africa, 44 (2018), pp. 193-220

Book chapters

‘Forgotten Objects of Empire: A Washing Line and the Material Experiences of East African Porters in the Creation of Museum Collections’ in Sarah Longair and John McAleer (eds.), Material Culture and the British Empire (UCL Press, 2026).

Blog posts