ALEXANDRA KELLY

Associate Professor, University of Wyoming

Alexandra Kelly will be discussing her recently published book, Consuming Ivory: Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England. Tacking between anthropology, archaeology and history, this book traces the way that the global circulation of ivory is wound up with enduring narratives about Africa as a place in need of saving. She uses a collection of defunct ivory objects displayed in the library of a small Connecticut village called Ivortyon to anchor a sprawling history of 19th century commodity flows, the emergence of a colonial conservation ethos in the 20th century, and modern-day anxieties surrounding elephant conservation, slavery legacies and heritage tourism. Ultimately, this project is about how representations of African pasts facilitate global relationships that remains problematically and strategically asymmetrical. 

Bio: Dr. Kelly graduated with a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2014 and is currently an associate professor in the History and Anthropology departments at the University of Wyoming. She is also the Director of the University of Wyoming’s Anthropology Museum and is currently engaged in several historical archaeology projects in the state of Wyoming. The connecting themes of her research are materiality, the history of capitalism, and frontiers and she looks forward to exploring the intersection of 19th-century capitalist expansion/extraction and the mobilization of these material histories in contemporary heritage projects across global contexts.