
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
