Profile
Biography
I am a historian of radical and socialist ideas, cultures, and communities in Modern Britain. I completed my PhD at King’s College London and held positions at the University of Manchester, Durham University, and Birkbeck College, before taking up my post at York in 2024.
Research
Overview
My research is concerned with the social life of ideas: the social, emotional, and spatial contexts within which radical ideas are produced and propagated. I am interested in how activists, political groups, and ordinary people experience and generate political ideas. As such, my work is also concerned with the afterlives of revolutionary and radical activity, in how memories and mythologies of past activism are redeployed in new historical presents.
I also have practical and research interests in public history and in queer histories and methodologies. I am currently working on a new project about intimacy, activism, and spaces of prefigurative politics in Modern Britain. As part of this project, I will be working with community groups, Clarion clubs, local activists, and miners’ welfares in Yorkshire and the North east.
My first book, The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries after 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2025) is about the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, active, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged. The book argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement. And these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain.
I am part of the History Workshop Journal editorial collective, and I enjoy working collaboratively and across disciplines. I have a new book out with Pluto Press, co-written with Joel White. Friends in Common: radical friendship & everyday solidarities (Pluto Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary exploration of friendship as a radical practice. Friends in Common uses friendship to think politically about our interpersonal connections and forms of belonging, overlaying examples from past, present, and imagined futures to illuminate possibilities that have often been suppressed by traditional historicization. We argue that understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work, and politics, and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape. Through this, we’ve ended up thinking carefully about friendship’s limits, what it means to build collective struggle against a capitalist system that works to co-opt, contain, and destroy relational bonds that threaten it. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice and a historical precedent is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and can be the antidote to capitalist despair.
Publications
Full publications list
Books:
The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries after 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Friends in Common: radical friendship & everyday solidarities (co-written with Joel White, Pluto Press, 2025)
Journal Articles:
‘Travelling activists, radical hospitality, and the intimate history of socialist organising in Britain, c.1880-1914’, Parliamentary History (forthcoming, 2026)
‘Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference’, British Journal for the History of Science, 56, 469–484 (2023)
‘Radical commemoration, the politics of the street, and the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871’, History Workshop Journal, 92, 83–105 (2021)
‘The Paris Commune in the British socialist imagination, 1871–1914’, History of European Ideas, 46 (5), 614–632 (2020)
‘The Paris Commune in London and the spatial history of ideas, 1871–1900’, The Historical Journal, 62 (4), 1021–1044 (2019)
Book Chapters:
‘The Blue Posts’, in Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub (Open City, 2021)
Magazine Articles
I have also published several essays, articles, and podcasts for wider audiences in Tribune, ROAR Magazine, DOPE Magazine, History Workshop Online, and Novara Media.
External Activity
I am on the editorial collective at History Workshop Journal.