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Amélie Allard

photo of Amelie Allard Gaige Hall 146
(401) 456-9768
aallard@ric.edu


Academic Background

Postdoctoral Fellow, Royal Ontario Museum, 2017-2019 (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada)

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus, 2016, Anthropology

M.A., University of Massachusetts Boston, 2010, Historical Archaeology

B.A., Université Laval, 2007, Archaeology

B.A., Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), Communication Studies, Multimedia minor, 2004


Research Interests

Dr. Allard’s research and teaching have drawn from the archaeological study of French and British colonialism in North America, in particular how colonists and Indigenous peoples interacted with each other, in particular when the colonists were venturing into unfamiliar landscapes. In a world where uprootedness, migration and displacement are increasingly part of people’s lived experiences at an unprecedented global scale, her work broadly addresses the issues of how mobility has affected communities in the past, especially how it affected their senses of place and of identification with others while they navigated new and foreign environments. Thus far Dr. Allard has pursued such questions as they relate to the highly mobile world of the eighteenth-century fur trade in the Great Lakes region of North America as a case study to understand the way diasporic, immigrant, merchant and/or Indigenous communities accommodated, negotiated, challenged, and altered social and physical landscapes. Given her focus on the last two hundred years, she seeks to better understand how these processes worked in colonial contexts, where intercultural encounters influenced social relations as well as the nature of interactions between people and the environment. Her analysis of existing fur trade collections at the Royal Ontario Museum has led her to expand upon the issues outlined above and give greater consideration to the power of rivers and other non-human forces in the entanglement between mobility and human histories.

Areas of Expertise

Historical archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, French and British colonialism, Identity politics, Faunal analysis, Great Lakes and Northeast archaeology

Courses Taught

Anth 102: Introduction to Archaeology

Anth 235: Bones and Stones - How Archaeologists Know

Anth 266: Anthropological and Indigenous Perspectives on Place

Selected Publications

In review Amélie Allard and Craig Cipolla, “Failure and Colonialism: The View from a Riverine Assemblage,” submitted for review to Historical Archaeology, December 14th 2018.

2020 Amélie Allard, “Relationships, Responsibility, and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 44, Issue 2 (pages forthcoming).

2018 Cipolla, Craig N. and Amélie Allard, “Recognizing River Power: Watery Views of Ontario's Fur Trade,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, volume number forthcoming. Available online https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9405-z

2018 Amélie Allard, “Communities, Survivance and Acts of ‘Residence’ in the Late Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade in Minnesota,” in Indian Culture and European Trade Goods: 50 Years of Insight on Midwest Historical Archaeology, H. Walder and J. Yann (editors). Midwest Archaeological Conference Occasional Papers No. 2: 67-86. 

2018 Amélie Allard, “Gendered Mobilities: Performing Masculinities in the Late Eighteenth-century Mobile Fur Trade Community.” Ethnohistory 65(1): 75-99.

2018 Amélie Allard, “Les marchands-voyageurs: une communauté en movement,” Archéologiques 31: 23-38. 

2015 Amélie Allard, “Foodways, Commensality and Nipmuc Identity: An Analysis of Faunal Remains From Sarah Boston’s Farmstead, Grafton, MA, 1790-1840,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19(1): 208-231. 

Page last updated: March 10, 2020