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I’m an intellectual historian of western Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and am interested in the history of ideas broadly conceived, from the history of political thought to the history of science. I have published on the histories of linguistics, race, nation, and the idea of the Celts, as well as on the French Revolution and its effects on political and historical thinking in France and Scotland. I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London, and I taught there and at Cambridge and the LSE – where I received my PhD – before joining UCL.
Major publications
- The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)
- Adam Ferguson’s Later Writings: New Letters and an Essay on the French Revolution, edited with Max Skjönsberg (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming)
- ‘After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History’, Journal of Modern History (forthcoming).
- ‘The Mother Tongue: Historical Study of the Celts and their Language(s) in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland’, Past & Present n. 243 (May, 2019), pp. 71-107.
- ‘Adam Ferguson, Sir John Macpherson, and the French Revolution: New Evidence and Perspectives’, Scottish Historical Review (forthcoming).
- ‘Language and the National Past in Napoleonic France: Reassessing the Académie celtique, 1805-1813’, French History vol. 35 no. 2 (2021), 219-242.
- ‘William Frédéric Edwards and the study of human races in France, from the Restoration to the July Monarchy’, History of Science vol.58 no. 3 (2020), 275-300.
- ‘E.E. Fournier d’Albe’s Fin de siècle: Science, Nationalism and Monistic Philosophy in Britain and Ireland’, Cultural & Social History vol. 14, no. 5 (December, 2017), pp. 599-620.
Teaching
- The History of Political Thought in the West
- Commerce and Empire in the Enlightenment
- The Political Thought of the French Revolution
- The Constitutional Thought of the French Revolution
