I am environmental historian working primarily on human engagements with the non-human animal world across the nineteenth and twientieth centuries. I'm especially interested in the sensory dimensions of those relationships and am currently working on dark environments, where naturalists yused their bodies and various technologies to access and understand the world around them. 

Present research interests:

My new book - Dark Natures: Finding Life in the Shadows - is nearing completion and will be published by University of Chicago Press. It spans the period since 1800 and focuses on caves, the deep ocean, the polar regions and 'everyday' night-time environments more broadly, the book explores how naturalists found new ways of trying to access and understanding dark environments and the beings they found there. It explores the ways in which histories of science and environment intersect with sensory histories and cultures of darkness more broadly. And, in the end, it asks what we - as a society that is largely disconnected from the wild dark - might learn from history's dark wayfarers.

As part of this broad research agenda, I have in recent years published several articles and book chapters that engage with darkness and the senses in some way, including intersections with histories of technology, histories of ability, and histories of the emotions. Between 2021 and 2023 I undertook an AHRC Leadership Fellowship which explored how naturalists' understandings of dark-dwelling creatures might help us to better understand the historical roots of the more modern notions of 'ability'and 'disability'.

As a sight-impaired historian, I also have an activist and intellectual interest in the senses. My work on dark environments is in some ways about what it means to 'see' and to 'know' the world of which we are a part. 

Previous research

My doctoral research and first suite of publications focused on the animal and environmental histories of Bristol Zoo Gardens from 1835 through to the early twenty-first century. This work represents the first extensive academic history of a provincial zoo, examining the vast array of human relationships with animals and their wild worlds in modernity. My work engaged with themes at the very forefront of animal, environmental, and imperial histories. In particular, I examined the human commodification of nature, its transformation into objects of science and spectacle, the creation of ‘almost-people’, animals in death (and dying), and human understandings of the world in an era of ecological impoverishment. Most significantly, I worked on the ways in which captve creatures might be said to have 'agency' in a context often perceived to be wholly oppressive. This work followed on from my earlier study of the phenomenon of celebrity beasts in Victorian culture, and human-nature conflict on the Australian frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Media:

Recent media engagements include appearances on BBC Radio 2 and 3, BBC Points West, and BBC Inside Out West. I have previously appeared on BBC 4’s Timeshift and consulted for an episode of Great British Railway Journeys. Ialso consulted on the BBC's 'What are Zoos for?' website.

Teaching and Research Supervision

I am an experienced Higher Education teacher. I was privileged to be awarded the Vice Chalncellor's Award for Education - and the Inspiring and Innovative Teaching Award - in 2024. I teach an innovative Final Year History UG unit called Dark Pasts, in which students explore the various ways in which darkness features in the history of modernity, and become active researchers in what is an underexplored - but critically important - area of research. 

I am available for Masters (Including Cabot MScR) and Doctoral research supervision and particularly invite research degree proposals on the following subjects:

 - 19th and 20th-century British animal history

 - histories of dark and/or nighttime environments

 - senses, emotions and environments.

 - scientific and technological cultures.

 - tourism.

 - disability histories.