About our staff

Having benefited from the itinerant childhood which accompanies being the offspring of a parent working in the armed forces, I find it hard to answer the question of where I'm from. My passport tells me Wolverhampton, a city in which I spent less than a year of my life. By the time I reached my teenage years, we'd lived in five further places, including Hong Kong and Northern Ireland, before finally settling a little more permanently in rural Lincolnshire.

My attachment to medieval history can, on reflection, be attributed largely to parents who encouraged my love of castles, Lego knights, and fictional worlds which owe a lot to the Middle Ages. But I didn't realise I was a medievalist until I began a BA at the University of East Anglia. An MA in Medieval History quickly followed (something I could never have undertaken without funding from the AHRC). 

After the MA, I spent two years working for Norfolk County Council fostering dreams of returning to academia in some form. Thankfully, with help from further AHRC funding, I was able to do so. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2017 with a thesis on comparative child kingship between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. 

I then spent just over three years as a Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge before beginning a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College London. In 2022, I transferred my British Academy fellowship to Edinburgh and joined the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.

Summary of research interests

• Britain & Ireland
• Europe
• Scotland

• Comparative & Global History
• Culture
• Gender
• Politics
• Society

• Medieval
• Medieval & Renaissance

I am a comparative historian working on Britain and Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, with an especial interest in understanding change and continuity over this period. My research touches on themes such as life cycle and gender, rulership and authority, and documentary culture and historical writing.

The relationship between age and identity is something which particularly fascinates me, and this forms the central focus of my current project on ‘Adolescence and Belonging in Medieval Europe, c.1000–c.1250’. I am interested in how concepts of adolescence shifted across the period, and how wider social and cultural changes impressed themselves on young people.

My first monograph, Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c.1050–1262 has recently been published with Cambridge University Press (2022). The book combines an investigation of boyhood and upbringing with a detailed analysis of child kings and their early experiences of rule.