Donna Bilak, who expects to complete her doctoral work later this summer, has received a fellowship from the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Donna received her MA in history from York University, Toronto. Before embarking on her academic career, she was a jewelry designer in Toronto.
You are working on your PhD at the BGC, What were you doing beforehand. What attracted you to our program?
Prior to graduate school, I trained as a jewelry designer and worked in Toronto’s jewelry industry as a designer-wax model maker, and unanticipated life events led me to pursue a master’s degree in history. I received my MA in history at York University in Toronto in 2002-3. My thesis, under the supervision of Richard C. Hoffmann, a medieval environmental historian, examined the emergence of botany in the sixteenth century. It was Hoffmann, actually, who had heard about the BGC, and advised me to pursue a doctorate here. He believed that the BGC’s transdisciplinary approach was the best place to develop my interests. The BGC has stretched my mind in ways that I never conceived of before I began the program.What is your focus of study here; how did you find yourself involved with it?
This is a unique institution that allowed me to pursue my dual interests in nineteenth-century jewelry history and technology—a subject I’ve been lecturing on professionally in Toronto and New York since 2000—and early modern intellectual culture (which I fell in love with at York while I was working on my master’s). My dissertation evolved out of my comps at the BGC, two of which handled related topics: early modern garden and landscape history, and early modern intellectual and cultural history. The dissertation is an intellectual biography of one John Allin (1623-83), a Puritan alchemist who operated on both sides of the Atlantic, and a material culture study of seventeenth-century alchemical practices in England and America, based on Allin’s extant correspondence and library inventory.
