Biography

My research focuses on comparative British and French eighteenth-century history, focussing on the cultural and social history of science. My Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Cultivating Commerce: Connoisseurship, Botany and the Plant Trade in London and Paris, c. 1760–c. 1815’, situates late eighteenth-century botany within the contexts of contemporary commercial culture and wider cultural frameworks of knowledge formation.
My post-doctoral project at the EUI will enlarge on this, investigating natural history as ‘connected history’ throughout the long eighteenth-century.
I received my Ph.D. in History from the University of Warwick in 2010, and was then an Early Career Fellow at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study. Previous awards include an Entente Cordiale scholarship for study in Paris (2006-07), and an ESRC 1+3 award to fund postgraduate study in the UK.
In 2009-2010 I worked as ‘Network Facilitator’ for two international, interdisciplinary research networks. Both reflect the development of my current research interests. ‘Connected Histories / Connected Sociologies’ investigates the methodological challenges posed by interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research in a globalising world. ‘Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World’ studies the trans-national flows of goods and people, ideas and technologies, and the transformations of local cultures that these movements brought about, in the late nineteenth century.
I have taught courses at Warwick for the period 1750-2000, with an emphasis on global history. In Spring 2010 I taught an M.A. module, on representations of women in eighteenth-century Britain, at the University of York.