I joined St Andrews as a lecturer in 2012 and was promoted to senior lecturer in 2018. I have a PhD in History from the University of Warwick (2010), and subsequently held an Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute and a Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science at the Huntington Library, California.

A social and cultural historian of science, my work focuses on French, British and global histories in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My research explores how access to knowledge was permitted and constrained, especially with regard to gender and social status. My first monograph, Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

I am currently working on two major research projects: Mismanaging Empire (working title), reconsiders eighteenth-century French colonial science from the perspective of the colonial household; Tracing Local Botanical Knowledge (working title) investigates the place of local (or Indigenous) botanical knowledge in the early nineteenth-century records of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Plant Collector Archive.

Alongside my academic work, I have also undertaken historical consultancy for the Royal Horticultural Society and am currently working with UNESCO on a project about botany and world heritage sites.

Mismanaging Empire? Knowledge and power in the French East India Company, c. 1750 – c. 1789

‘Knowledge is power’ – or so said Francis Bacon. And so says the current historiography on colonial science. But whose knowledge, and knowledge of what? My research puts the power/knowledge equation to the test via a micro-historical study of the de Briancourts, a French family who lived in the prized Mughal port of Surat (India) in the mid eighteenth century. By comparing their social, cultural and commercial activities to those of other French colonial families in India, this project investigates the knowledge cultures that variously sustained or destabilised eighteenth-century French colonial power. It asks three key questions: (1) What cultures of knowledge emerged within colonial families? (2) How important was the intellectual and commercial knowledge developed therein to the expression of power? And (3) through what symbolic means did households make manifest French power? What defines this research as different is its attention to the family – a cohort that has been consistently overlooked in the historiography, but which considerably affected how power was asserted among European and Indian rivals.

Tracing Local Botanical Knowledge: Plants and People in the Royal Horticultural Society Plant Collector Archive

This collaborative research project with Dr Elena Romero-Passerin (University of Exeter) asks what methods we might use to identify and give place to the local (or Indigenous) botanical knowledge that underpinned early plant collecting by the Horticultural Society of London (HSL). Between 1821 and 1862, the HSL (now the Royal Horticultural Society) organised 15 plant collecting expeditions outside of Europe. Tasked with bringing back as many specimens and seeds as they could, the Society’s collectors relied heavily on the help and cooperation of local (sometimes Indigenous) populations to carry out their mission – but rarely recorded much detail about that assistance. Our project recontextualises the Horticultural Society plants in the light of current botanical and ethnobotanical research, and in so doing advocates for the significance of peoples whose contributions have been wholly overlooked in previous histories of plant collecting.

Broadly speaking, my courses examine the relationship between eighteenth-century politics, science, society and culture. I encourage students to work not only with texts but also with visual and material sources. I teach two 3000-level honours modules: ‘Politics, Culture and Society in the French Revolution’, and ‘States at Sea? Colonialism, Commerce and Culture in the 18^th-century Indian Ocean World’. My 4000-level special subject, ‘Curiosity, Empire and Science in 18th-century Europe’ explores Enlightenment cultural history at a deeper level via the history of collecting and museums. I also teach historiography and special interest topics for the MLitts in Modern, Early Modern and Transnational History.

I have to date supervised 10 PhD students to completion, on topics ranging from early modern numeracy to the nineteenth-century whaling industry, from eighteenth-century political caricatures to Enlightenment botanical gardens, and from naval surgeons to zoological collectors. I am always happy to hear from prospective students considering pursuing social and cultural history / history of science, c. 1650 – c. 1900.

(Profile last updated July 2025)