About our staff

A graduate of Monash and Glasgow universities, I have previously taught at Sheffield, East London, City, and Birkbeck. I have been a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh, and am an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.

Editorial collective member for Gender & History

Summary of research interests

• Australasia and the Pacific
• Britain & Ireland
• North America
• Scotland

• Comparative & Global History
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Imperialism
• Migration
• Politics
• Society
• War

• Early Modern
• Eighteenth Century

With a background in women's history and specialising in the history of masculinities, I have published widely on Scottish gender history across the long eighteenth century.

I have particular expertise in gender, the 1707 Union and the Scottish Enlightenment in global contexts.

Taking a global approach, my current research interrogates inventions of Whiteness. Focusing on the Sydney colony estsblished on unceded Gadigal country, I examine the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and cultures of civility and settler colonial violence.

Whiteness, Enlightenment and Violence in New South Wales, 1788-1820

Ideas of the 'savage' in Scotland, 1690 - 1800