About our staff

Deputy director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History

I am a historian of early modern England and the Atlantic world, with a focus on social and legal history. I received my B.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before joining Edinburgh, I was the Kinder Junior Research Fellow in Atlantic History at the Rothermere American Institute, the University of Oxford, in partnership with the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri.

Office hours: Wednesday 11 am - 1 pm. Please sign up on my Bookings page.

Summary of research interests

• Britain & Ireland
• Caribbean
• North America

• Comparative & Global History
• Labour
• Society
• Urban
• War

• Early Modern

• historical concepts of consent, persuasion, and free will
• social control and labour coercion
• freedom of contract
• documented and undocumented mobility

I am currently completing my first book manuscript, ‘Captured Consent: Contract Labour in English Charity, Colonization, and Warfare, 1600–1700’. At the heart of the book are transatlantic indentured servants, who I study in comparison and connection to apprenticed pauper children, conscripted soldiers, and prisoners of war put to work in England. The book argues that exploitative early modern labour practices played a significant role in the development of the concepts of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent. 

I convene an international research network, "Historicizing Consent: What did it mean to agree in the late medieval and early modern world?" with co-convenor Tamar Herzog. Further details including a collaborative bibliography are available here: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/historicizingconsent.

I am the deputy director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History.

Revolutionary Britain (Special Subject)

Slavery and Forced Labour in the British Atlantic World (Honours Elective)

Historical Skills and Methods II: Voices from Below in the Early English Atlantic World

Early Modern History: A Connected World (Pre-honours)

The Global Economy (Pre-honours)

Global Connections (Pre-honours)

Historian's Toolkit (Pre-honours)

Freedom and Coercion in the Making of the Atlantic World

Economic and Social Theory for Historical Analysis

Professional Skills for Historians

Themes in the Historiography of the Americas