Ella Beaudoin

Ella is a PhD candidate working on 19th- and early-20th-century Kenyan ethnographic collections that were gathered in the shadow of British colonial violence, and are now housed in the UK. She focuses on re-establishing provenance and re-contextualising these collections with input from both Kenyan and British diaspora communities. Her driving research question is, ‘How do we move forward in reparative ways that ensure these objects, their stories, and the communities connected to them may be treated with more care and empathy?

She comes to this research through years of experience as a field archaeologist (working at sites in South Africa, the United States, and Kenya) and as an educator and project manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She received her BA in anthropology from American University, focusing on the Paleolithic. She also earned her MPhil in Archaeological Research from Cambridge University and is currently a Gates Cambridge Trust Scholar.