Dr Alexandra Watson Jones 

As the V&A’s Provenance Research Curator I am responsible for leading on and coordinating research into the ownership histories of objects in the museum’s collection. I took up this role in January 2025, following a year working as a Project Curator on the British Museum’s Recovery Programme.

I previously worked at the V&A from 2015-2019, and curated the museum’s 2018 display Maqdala 1868, highlighting Ethiopian objects in the V&A collection that have long been the subject of controversy, debate, and calls for repatriation. In 2024 I completed my PhD in Art History at the University of St Andrews, a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership project with National Museums Scotland. My doctoral research built upon my work with the V&A’s Ethiopian collections, exploring the collecting of Ethiopian material culture by British individuals and institutions from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

Before joining the museum world I worked as a software engineer, and I enjoy exploring new technologies and innovative approaches to provenance research.

Selected Publications

“Maqdala and the South Kensington Museum: 150 years later.” In Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse, edited by Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

“Ethiopian Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum.” African Research and Documentation 135 (2019): 8-24