Allison Donoghue approaches history from an interdisciplinary lens, centering her work around material culture. She is broadly interested in gender, trade, and the relationship between Europeans and Native peoples in seventeenth-century New England and New Amsterdam. In January 2024, Donoghue wrote an essay entitled, “A Piece of the “Gold Blanket”: Gardiner’s Island, Captain William Kidd, and the Gifting of Family History,” which was published in Boston University’s journal SEQUITUR. Donoghue is the 2024 Tiffany & Co. Foundation Twelve-Month Curatorial Intern in American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Qualifying Paper: “A bead, a thimble or some other pauble”: Thimbles and Self-Identity in Early New York