I am a historian of early North America with a particular interest in the origins, events, and consequences of the American Revolution. I have a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. I also have a Bachelor of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History from the University of Sydney in Australia.
My research primarily looks at the politics of naming: the act of labelling persons, groups, and events and the power relations and cultural changes that process involves and reveals. I applied this approach in my doctoral thesis, which explored the politics of epithets – identity terms (like “patriot,” “republican,” and “American”) that people at the time used to describe themselves, build bonds of belonging, and label their opponents – from the start of the imperial crisis in 1763 through to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. My first book, provisionally titled Fighting Words in the American Revolution, 1763-87, will develop these ideas further. This research has been generously supported by the David Library of the American Revolution, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, International Centre for Jefferson Studies, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, among others. I am also applying my expertise in the American Revolution and its aftermath as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Legacies of Enslavement inquiry at Cambridge. I am using my knowledge of slavery and abolition in this period to examine the education of slaveholders (including three signatories to the Declaration of Independence) at Cambridge, and the crucial role of those students in the West India lobby, which defended slavery until the institution’s abolition throughout the British Empire in 1833. I am also interested in the role of Cambridge fellows and alumni in perpetuating proslavery and racial thought from the creation of the Virginia Company in 1606 until the rise of eugenics and the new racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
