ABOUT FLIP

I am a Research Fellow in Economic Botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with a focus on the ethnobotany of traditional crops and useful plants, agrobiodiversity and resilience. I am especially interested in documenting endangered orphan crops and to situate their  use within their local environmental, historical and cultural contexts. Currently, much of my research is in NE Africa. 

 

I am also an archaeologist and archaeobotanist  and worked at the British Museum in the Department of Scientific Research before joining Kew. Initially, as a Leverhulme Resarch Fellow to study the archaeobotany of Amara West - an ancient Egyptian town in Sudan, and later as Principle Investigator for two AHRC grants that combined ethnobotany and archaeobotany to study recent and long term crop changes in northern Sudan. 

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Originally a historian, I am interested in developing interdisciplinary approaches to studying plant uses, and am at home working through archives, being in the field or in the lab.  - I studied history (BA, MA)  at Trinity College Oxford, and art history (post-grad diploma) at the Courtauld Institute of Art, before, a bit later on, my Masters and PhD at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL (2010) - Diversity of plant and land use during the Near Eastern Neolithic, phytolith perspectives from Çatalhöyük