Eliza McKee
- Role
- Researcher
Principal Researcher – Northern Ireland Records
About
Dr Eliza McKee is Expert Specialist in Northern Ireland records at The National Archives and a former US-UK Fulbright Scholar at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Irish social and cultural history, with expertise in poverty, material culture, consumption practices, and dress history. She explores how clothing practices intersected with identity, mobility, and economic hardship and has published widely on dress history, archival development, and heritage interpretation.
Eliza’s work bridges historical scholarship with heritage practice and public engagement, advancing digitisation initiatives and global research networks on dress and migration.
Research activity
Eliza's research examines the social and cultural history of Ireland through the lens of material culture, poverty, and dress. Her doctoral work at Queen’s University Belfast, Non-elite Clothing Acquisition in Post-Famine Ulster, c.1850–1914, investigated how working-class communities accessed and produced clothing, using archival sources, folklore, and material evidence. It revealed how poverty, mobility, and informal economies shaped everyday dress practices. This work established her expertise in dress history and the lived experience of poverty, and she has continued to contribute to broader debates on sustainability and working-class consumption.
Following her PhD, Eliza expanded her research internationally as a US-UK Fulbright Scholar at New York University, investigating Irish and Scots-Irish dress, migration, and identity formation in the United States, c.1800–1900. Her work examined clothing as a marker of belonging among lower-class immigrants and later focused on materiality in poverty letters to Ulster-born clothing magnate Alexander Turney Stewart, uncovering transnational networks of need, charity, and identity.
Currently, Eliza is completing her monograph Clothing the Irish Poor: Ulster, 1850–1914 (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming) and publishing widely on dress history, informal economies, and heritage interpretation. At The National Archives, she leads a landmark digitisation initiative on Troubles-related records, prioritising accessibility, ethical stewardship, and trauma-informed practice.
Publications
- Clothing the Irish Poor: Ulster, 1850–1914 (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming)
- “Alexander Turney Stewart Correspondence 1862–1876,” Analecta Hibernica (forthcoming).
- “Models of needlework: a needlework sample book from the Dublin Female Orphan House,” in Vicky Holmes and Joseph Harley (eds), Objects of Poverty (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).
- “Travelling tailors and shoemakers and the making of everyday clothing in rural Ireland, c.1850–1914,” in Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza (eds), Everyday Fashion: Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600 (Bloomsbury Fashion, 2024), pp. 239–52.
- “‘The tailors generally went from house to house in those days’: travelling tailors and the making of apparel in the rural Irish dwelling, 1850–1900,” in Heather Laird and Jay Roszman (eds), Dwelling(s) in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2023), pp. 241–58.
- Introduction and co-editor, “Itinerant traders: elusive subjects moving at the intersection of historical fields,” Journal of Historical Retailing and Consumption, vol. viii, no. 3 (2022), pp. 203–12.
- “Captured in the clothing: Ireland, 1850s–1890s” (with Elaine Farrell), Dress: The Journal of Costume Society of America, vol. xlviii, no. 2 (2022), pp. 125–42.
- “The origins and development of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1922–1948,” Archives and Records, vol. xl, no. 2 (2019), pp. 164–78.
Contact
Eliza welcomes collaborative research enquiries on material culture, dress studies, and Irish social and cultural history.