I am a Doctoral Candidate in Modern Britain and the British Empire. I focus on British imperial culture and governance across the Atlantic world in the long nineteenth century, especially at the empire’s frontiers. My major research interests concern cultural and political history, comparative imperialisms, and histories of gender, sexuality, and the body. I am currently a Graduate Affiliate at UF's Center for European Studies, a Predoctoral Fellow at the Clark Library and the Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies (UCLA), and a Short-Term Fellow at the Winterthur Library. I have previously been a Short-Term Fellow at the Huntington Library.
My dissertation, Ancient Obligations: British Imperial Culture and Politics in Belize and the Caribbean Basin, 1763-1862, traces questions of sovereignty, subjecthood, and negotiated imperialism in the British Empire from the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the middle of the nineteenth century. Specifically, I concentrate on the British settlements in what is now Belize and the Afro-Indigenous region of La Mosquitia (or the Miskito Coast). The study is especially concerned with how the British government in Whitehall, colonial administrators across a vast global empire, and the masses of the British public, contemplated and debated how these frontiers, which boasted large indigenous, African, and multi-ethnic populations and over which British control extended only tentatively, “fitted into” questions of empire building and governance. By concentrating my study in settlements whose status as colonies was disputed and actively debated for over two centuries, I show that the political and cultural construction of empire was at its most reactive and adaptive at the margins.
I have published a chapter from this research in Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1810s-1940s (Brill, 2025). Additionally, I co-authored an entry for the Oxford Bibliographies’ “Atlantic History” series on “Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery in the Atlantic World" and a public blog post on pedagogy for the North American Conference on British Studies’ blog series, Broadsides.