Staff Profiles
I specialise in the history of people's bodily experiences in the rural and urban realms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, working at the intersection of environmental history, the history of the body and senses, and the history of science.
I joined the History Department in January 2026 as Research Associate on Elizabeth Turk's Wellcome-funded Accessing the wellbeing commons project, working on contemporary histories of social inequalities and access to wild swimming site in Devon.
Before Newcastle, I was Lecturer in the History of Science and the Environment at King's College London, following a PhD at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. From 2022-2025, I was co-founder and director of the Bristol Senses and Sensations research group – and remain on its steering committee.
I am particularly interested in questions of how environments acquired meaning in the past, and the role tangible encounters between bodies and matter has played in this process. I am currently working on a monograph that examines individuals’ embodied encounters with the environments of rural Britain in the nineteenth century.
My teaching expertise is wide ranging, having taught core skills and methods modules in History and Geography, and undergraduate and MA courses on British, European and global histories, with a specific focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have also taught specialist modules on environmental and animal history, urban history and sensory history.