Isabella Rosner is the Curator of the Royal School of Needlework and Research Associate at Witney Antiques. At both institutions she researches and cares for nearly 500 years of needlework. She is soon to receive her PhD from King’s College London, where she studied Quaker women’s needlework, waxwork, and shellwork in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London and Philadelphia. Isabella was named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2023.
Her work broadly focuses on historical embroidery stitched between 1500 and 1900, with European and American schoolgirl samplers and early modern women’s needlework in Britain her areas of focus. She is especially interested in what can be learnt from extant stitched objects and how that information fills in gaps left by the historical record. Isabella also hosts the successful ‘Sew What?’ podcast about historic needlework and those often anonymous girls and women who stitched it.
