Beverly Lemire, DPhil, MA, BA

About

Beverly Lemire was born in Montréal and pursued her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Guelph in Ontario. She later moved to the United Kingdom, earning her doctorate at Oxford University before returning to Canada, where she was a history professor at the University of Lethbridge and later the University of New Brunswick. Lemire joined the University of Alberta in 2004 and is currently a professor in the Department of History, Classics and Religion and a Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

 Lemire’s cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research traces the evolution of material culture from the 17th to the 19th centuries. An expert in her field, Lemire uses an intersectional lens to critically analyze the gendered cultural and imperial forces that shape global trade, with a special focus on the British context and comparative research. Her work examines the ways in which early modern globalism, colonial and imperial processes figure in material cultures across time and societies. Currently, Lemire is spearheading an SSHRC-funded project titled Fashioning the Imperial Atlantic: Race, Gender and Material Culture, c. 1660–1820. The mixed-methods project explores how racial precepts were reflected in and reshaped by material cultures, with an emphasis on imperial sites in the British Atlantic.

A respected scholar and trailblazer whose work has transformed her discipline, Lemire has nearly four decades of research and teaching experience, with two decades of service to the U of A community. She previously held a Killam Research Fellowship (1999–2001) and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003 for her remarkable research contributions. Lemire was also the 2012 recipient of the J. Gordin Kaplan Award in recognition of her commitment to research excellence. Most recently, she was appointed to the Order of Canada (2023) for her extraordinary contributions to the nation.

 

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Research

Fashioning Empire: Race, Gender & Material Culture, c. 1660-1820

Funded by the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada, Insight Grant, 2022-25.

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Teaching

I incorporate material culture study into my courses through a variety of techniques and visits to museum collections on campus.

Co-edited with Laura Peers and Anne Whitelaw, Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780-1980 (MQUP, 2021).https://www.mqup.ca/object-lives-and-global-histories-in-northern-north-america-products-9780228003984.php?page_id=46&

Winner of the Horowitz Book Prize for the best book on the decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas published in 2021.

https://www.bgc.bard.edu/about/news/922/19-oct-2022-2021-horowitz

This project studies objects and object systems to better understand the ways race and racial hierarchies became integral to western society, to expressions of

gender and everyday life. Clothing and other everyday media are my focus; habits and routines are explored including the reification of whiteness in dress and laundry.

Beverly Lemire

Amsterdam. 2024 February; Floral Culture in the Tudor and Stuart Courts, ed. Susannah Lyon-Whaley

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Editors: Christopher Breward, Beverly Lemire & Giorgio Riello

Cambridge, UK. 2023 July; 11. 1-1524

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Beverly Lemire

London & New York. 2023 June; Routledge International Handbook of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, eds., Rikke Andreasse, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, and Shirley Anne Tate 10.4324/9781003120612-12

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Beverly Lemire

London. 2023 March; Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond: Identities, Polities and Glocal Economies, Veronika Hyden-Hanscho and Werner Stangle, eds.

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Beverly Lemire

Amsterdam. 2023 February; In-Between Textiles: Weaving Cultural Encounters in the Early Modern World, Beatriz Marin-Aquilera and Stefan Hanss, eds.

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Beverly Lemire

Paris. 2022 July; Album Holker. The Holker Album. Textile Samples and Industrial Espionage in the 18th Century, Ariane Fennetaux & John Styles, eds.

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Beverly Lemire

New York. 2022 February; Writing Material Culture History, 2nd ed. Anne Gerritsen & Giorgio Riello, eds

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Beverly Lemire

MAVCOR Journal (mavcor.yale.edu). 2021 April;

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Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers and Anne Whitelaw

Montreal. 2021 January;

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Beverly Lemire

Montreal & Kingston. 2020 February; Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation, Kristine Bruland, Anne Gerritsen, Pat Hudson & Giorgio Riello, eds.

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Beverly Lemire

2019 January; Dressing Global Bodies, Beverly Lemire & Giorgio Riello, eds

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co-editors Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello

2019 January; 10.4324/9781351028745

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Beverly Lemire

2018 January; 10.1017/9780511978814

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Beverly Lemire

Cultural and Social History. 2016 January; 31 (1):1-23 10.1080/14780038.2016.1133493

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Beverly Lemire

Journal of British Studies. 2015 February; 54 (2):288-319 10.1017/jbr.2015.7

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Janice Helland, Beverly Lemire & Alena Buis, eds.

London. 2014 September;

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Beverly Lemire

Textile: Journal of Cloth & Culture, Special Issue. 2012 May; 10 (2):306-324 10.2752/175183512X13315695424392

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Beverly Lemire

Oxford. 2011 May;

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Beverly Lemire, ed.

London. 2010 September;

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Beverly Lemire, ed.

London. 2010 August;