Hannah Prescott part of the Dutch Textile Research Project thanks to Kress Pre-Doctoral Fellowship

Hannah Prescott threads the needle on the Dutch textile trade

Hannah Prescott was named a Kress Pre-Doctoral Fellow and has since September 2023 been supporting research related to the Dutch Textile Trade Project--a digital humanities platform that explores the circulation of globally-sourced textiles on Dutch ships around the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her work focuses on transcribing Dutch shipping records from the Zeeland Archives in Middelburg that identify textiles exported from the Netherlands to West Africa and the Americas on ships directed by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC) between 1699-1780. The MCC played a critical role in transporting commodities and enslaved peoples across European trading posts and colonies in the Atlantic world. Under the direction of the Dutch Textile Trade's leaders--Professor Carrie Anderson (Middlebury College) and Dr. Marsely Kehoe (independent scholar)--Hannah has also been contributing original scholarship to the project's Visual Textile Glossary, and compiling data for visual models that help to clarify the types of textiles deemed most critical to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. Her research from this fellowship will inform a chapter of her dissertation, Interweaving the Local and the Global: Linen and the Dutch Republic during the Long Seventeenth Century.

Congratulations Hannah, on this award and this wonderful opportunity!