ACU Researcher

Dr Sarah Bendall

Senior Lecturer - Gender and Women's History Research Centre

Sarah A. Bendall FRHistS is a senior lecturer at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a material culture historian whose research examines the roles of women in the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500-1800. She has expertise in seventeenth-century dress and recreative methodologies, such as historical dress reconstruction.

Sarah was awarded her PhD from the University of Sydney. During her doctoral research she was a visiting research student at Kings College London. Prior to joining ACU, she held positions at the University of Western Australia, the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. She has also been awarded fellowships from The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Powerhouse Museum. Her first book, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body, and Women in Early Modern England, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021 and shortlisted for the Society for Renaissance Studies biannual book prize in 2022 (awarded highly commended). Her second monograph, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

She is a co-investigator on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Making Historical Dress Network.

She has previously supervised honours and PhD projects in history and art history. She is keen to supervise projects relating to dress and material culture history, recreative practice and experimental history, and gender and cultural history of early modern Europe.

At ACU Sarah is coordinator of the Bachelor of Global Studies Degrees and teaches into units such as HIST105: Early Modern Europe, ARTS247: Renaissance to Romanticism, and ENHU270: Unsustainable: A Global History of Consumption.

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Select publications

Books

• Sarah A. Bendall, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body, and Women in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury Academic/Visual Arts, 2021)
• Sarah A Bendall, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens: Gender and Work in the Royal Wardrobe and the Fashion Marketplace (Bloomsbury Academic/Visual Arts, forthcoming)

Edited Books

• Sarah A. Bendall and Serena Dyer, eds., Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: The Body, Gender, and Material Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048557370

Journal articles and book chapters

• Sarah A. Bendall, 'The Soapmakers and the Queen: The Rhetoric of Maternalism in the "Oil Affairs" of late Sixteenth-Century England', in Queens, Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Premodern Europe, 1400-1800, edited by Susan Broomhall and Clare Davidson (Routledge, 2025), 270-291. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032723068-10
• Sarah A. Bendall and Catriona Fisk, 'Generating Bodies: Investigating Foundation Garments and the Early Modern Maternal Body through Making', in Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: The Body, Gender, and Material Culture, edited by Sarah A. Bendall and Serena Dyer (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 185-210. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048557370-011
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'Whalebone and Fashion in Seventeenth-Century England: Changing Consumer Culture, Trade and Innovation', in Everyday Fashion: Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600, edited by Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza (Bloomsbury Academic: 2023).
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'The Queens' Dressmakers: women's work and the clothing trades in late seventeenth-century London', Women's History Review, 32, 2 (2023): 389-414. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2022.2136197.
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'Female Personifications and Masculine Forms: Gender, Armour and Allegory in the Habsburg-Valois Conflicts of sixteenth Century Europe', Gender & History 35, 1 (2023): 42-67.
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'Whalebone and the Wardrobe of Elizabeth I: Whaling and the Construction of Aristocratic Fashions in Sixteenth-Century Europe', Apparence(s): Histoire et Culture du Paraître, Special Issue: Animal Fashions edited by Ariane Fennetaux and Gabriele Mentges, 11 (2022). DOI: 10.4000/apparences.3653
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'Adorning Masculinities? The Commissioning and Wearing of Hat Badges during the Habsburg-Valois Italian Wars', Sixteenth Century Journal, 52, 3 (2021): 539-570.
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'Women's Dress and the Demise of the Tailoring Monopoly: Farthingale-makers, Body-makers, and the Changing Textile Marketplace in Seventeenth-Century London', Textile History 52, 1-2 (2021): 23-55. DOI: 1080/00404969.2021.1913470.
• Sarah A. Bendall, 'The case of the "french vardinggale": A Methodological Approach to Reconstructing and Understanding Ephemeral Garments', in Fashion Theory, Special Issue on 'The Making Turn', edited by Peter McNeil and Melissa Bellanta, 23, 3 (2019): 363-399. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1603862.
• • Sarah A. Bendall, '"Take Measure of your Wide and Flaunting Garments": The Farthingale, Gender and the Consumption of Space in Elizabethan and Jacobean England', Renaissance Studies, 33, 5 (2019): 712-737. DOI: 10.1111/rest.12537.
• Sarah Anne Bendall, 'To Write a Distick upon It: Busks and the Language of Courtship and Sexual Desire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England', Gender & History, 26, 2, (2014): 199-222. DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12066.

Funded Projects

• The Making Historical Dress Network. Arts and Humanities Research Council UK Network grant. Principal investigator Serena Dyer (De Montfort University), 2023-25. The network explores how picking up a needle and thread can enhance our knowledge of the past through recreative methods. The network aims to establish a hub for the international community of academics and practitioners who work on recreation methods in dress history, from costume makers to scholars, and from curators to YouTubers. It provides a forum for the discussion of best practice, terminology, how to capture and communicate tacit knowledge, and showcases work in the field.
• Indian Silks and Female Retailers: Pasold Research Fund Project Grant, 2023-4. This project seeks to explore what 'Indian silks' were, how they were sold and used, and, significantly, how their trade alongside calicoes/chintz facilitated the rise of the female retailers and makers in the late seventeenth century. It considers how economic gains made by women in places such as Britain were made at the expense of increasingly colonised men and women in the 'East Indies'.

Accolades and awards

• ACU Faculty of Education and Arts (FEA) Research Awards: Research Excellence - Mid-Career Researcher Award (2024).
• Research Project Grant awarded by the Pasold Research Fund (2023).
• Elected as a Fellow, Royal Historical Society UK (2023).
• Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) UK Network Grant, Co-Investigator (2023-25)
• Shaping Femininity awarded Highly Commended, Society for Renaissance Studies UK Biannual Book Prize (2022)
• MAAS Visiting Research Fellow at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2022)
• Publication Grant awarded by the Pasold Research Fund (2020)
• McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, The University of Melbourne (2020)
• Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) Margaret Hannay Visiting Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. (2018)
• David Walker Memorial Visiting Fellow in Early Modern History at The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, UK. (2018)
• Research Project Grant awarded by the Pasold Research Fund (2018)

Appointments and Affiliations

• Fellow, Royal Historical Society (2023-)
• Victorian Metro Representative, Australian Women's History Network, 2023-
• Co-convenor of Melbourne Feminist History Group Seminars, 2021-

Public engagement

• 'Make a Sixteenth-Century Farthingale' sewing workshop, developed with entre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades and ACU's Centre for Regional Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
• '300 Years of Women's Fashion Workshop', developed with the Australian Centre for Gold Rush Collections and ACU's Centre for Regional Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
• Contributor: Sarah Bendall, "What was the mantua? How a 17th-century gown transformed dressmaking and ushered in financial freedom for women", The Conversation (2024)
• Contributor: Sarah Bendall, "'Whales died so women could look like this': what shows like Bridgerton get wrong about whalebone and corsetry", The Conversation (2023)
• Radio Interview: "Self Improvement Wednesdays: Whaling and Consumer culture", radio interview with Richard Glover, ABC Sydney Drive, 10 May 2022.
• Contributor: Sarah Bendall, "Remaking history: in hand-making 400-year-old corset designs, I was able to really understand how they impacted women", The Conversation (2022)
• Contributor: Sarah Bendall, "'I die where I cling': garters and 'busks' inscribed with love notes were the sexy lingerie of the past", The Conversation (2021)