I joined the department in 2002, having received my PhD from Cambridge in 1999. Before coming to UCL I was a junior research fellow at Cambridge, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard and a lecturer in American history at Queen Mary, University of London. My first degree was in Modern History at Oxford. My broad area of research is the history of the United States, and I specialise in the issues of political culture, nationalism and political mobilisation. My work so far has concentrated on the Civil War period. My book, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (Oxford University Press, 2006) explores the impact of the Civil War on party politics and political participation, while The American Civil War (Palgrave, 2007) offers an up to date reinterpretation of the war for students and general readers. I am currently working on two projects: (1) a book on the political culture of the mid-nineteenth-century United States and (2) an article on images of the United States in the nineteenth century as part of the AHRC-funded "Images of America" project.

I teach two survey courses in the history of the USA :"Building the American Nation", on the period 1789-1920 and "The Making of Modern America", which covers American history since 1920. Among my other courses are a full year course on the Civil War and Reconstruction and an MA Field of Study on Lincoln and the Civil War and on American historiography. Full details of all my courses can be viewed here.

I currently supervise students working on American political history in the nineteenth century and am second supervisor for doctoral students working on Anglo-American relations and American politics in the post-war period. I would be delighted to supervise doctoral students working in any period of American political history or in any aspect of the Civil War or antebellum era.

Selected Publications

• The American CIvil War (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
• No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
• 'Lincoln Scholarship and the Return to Intimacy,' Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27:2 (Summer 2006)
• 'American Political Culture,' in Howard Temperly and Chris Bigsby, eds., A New Introduction to American Studies (Pearson Education, 2005)
• The Republican Party: A Photographic History of the GOP (San Francisco: Thunder Bay Press, 2003)
• Editor, The North and the Nation in the Civil War Era: Collected Essays of Peter J. Parish (Fordham University Press, 2003)
• 'Partisan politics and the public sphere: the Civil War North,'American Nineteenth Century History, 2 (2001)
• 'A contested legacy: the Civil War and party politics in the North, 1865-1900,' in S-M. Grant & P. Parish eds. The enduring legacy of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002)

Links
Adam Smith's course websites
BrANCH -- the British Nineteenth Century Historians association
The UCL History Department