I am Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol, where I teach and write about visual and material culture from the early modern period to the recent past. 

My research explores the visual and material sites of the home, the collaged object, and the body from the eighteenth century to the present day. Utilising approaches from the histories of art and design and visual and material culture studies, alongside interdisciplinary perspectives from social and cultural history, literary criticism, gender studies, and queer theory, my work examines everything from craft practices, textiles, furnishings, print culture, and textiles, to paper collage, painting, and dress. Geographically, my work focuses on Britain and North America, but it also explores the transregional effects and artistic legacies of Britain’s colonial rule. 

My first monograph Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022 (paperback, 2024) is the first book to explore the role of emotions and social relations in the material culture of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century home. Employing interdisciplinary approaches to examine a range of domestic spaces, objects, and individuals, it interrogates the broader cultural and material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives. A review praised the book for exploring ‘the notion of homely spaces with a depth of scholarship that is exceptional’ and called it ‘a masterclass in close reading’, and the book was Longlisted for the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize 2023. 

My second monograph, Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press, and provides a radical, global, and inclusive history of collage as an artistic form. As collage made outside of continental Europe and prior to the earliest modernist examples of 1912 has consistently been overlooked within art historical scholarship, the project completely rewrites its history. The book was named one of the Chronicle of Higher Education's 'Best Scholarly Books of 2024', and it was reviewed in the journal Leonardo as ‘art history as it should be today’. 

I am currently writing my first trade book, which explores the visual cultures of fatness from the eighteenth century to the present day, titled Unseemly: A Visual History of the Fat Body. It will be published by Princeton University Press in 2027. You can preview some of this work in articles written for The Conversation. 

My next monograph, Collage & Knowledge: Crafting Selves and Creating Understanding, 1680-1912, is under contract with Manchester University Press for its ‘Rethinking Arts Histories’ series. 

I have also published articles in the British Art Studies, Word & Image, Visual Culture in Britain, the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, Journal 18, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and I have co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies on craft and masculinity. My research on collage made before 1900 informed the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition, Cut & Paste: 400 Years of Collage (2019), and features in a chapter in the exhibition’s award-nominated catalogue.

I have held short-term research fellowships at Yale's Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, the Huntington Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the University of St Andrews, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. I was awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship in 2021 for my project ‘Composite Cultural Production: Transnational and Multidisciplinary Approaches to Pre-Modernist Collage’. 

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