Participant Info
- First Name
- Alanna
- Last Name
- McKnight
- Country
- Canada
- State
- alanna.mcknight@ryerson.ca
- Affiliation
- Ryerson University
- Website URL
- Keywords
- Corsets, Toronto, Labour, Dress, Nineteenth century, needletrades, dressmaking, seamstress,
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am a Canadian dress and labour historian, specializing in nineteenth century Toronto and women in the needle-trades. I try to tell the stories of the women who sewed and owned businesses in Toronto, whose names would otherwise be lost to time.
My doctoral dissertation focused on corsets as a site of feminists agency, using Toronto’s manufacturing and consumer centres as a case-study. I am interesting in unpacking established history, to challenge problematic rhetoric (ie: the idea that corsets were imposed on women as a tool of patriarchal control)
- Recent Publications
“Dressmakers and Seamstresses in Toronto, 1834-1861” in Costume 51:1 (March, 2018).
“Fashions from Hell: The Enduring Influence of Jack the Ripper on Dress” in Dressed to Kill: Fashionable Horror in Film and Literature, Julia Petrov and Gudrun Whitehead eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
“Hard and Straight: The Creating of Nineteenth Century Masculinity Through Corsets” in Crossing Boundaries: Fashion to Deconstruct and Reimagine Gender, Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly eds. London: Intellect Press (upcoming).
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- alanna_mck
- Country Focus
- Canada
- Expertise by Geography
- North America
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Gender, Material Culture, Urban History, Women
