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About Me
I'm a historian of medicine, education, and the workplace.
I'm currently based at the Institute of Education, working as Postdoctoral Research Fellow on The School Meals Service: Past, Present and Future? project. I was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Addressing Health project between 2020-2023. Before this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC funded Mobile Museum: Economic Botany in Circulation project at Royal Holloway and Kew Gardens.
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I received my PhD in History in early 2018, where I was the recipient of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. During this time, I was based at King's College London and The Science Museum, London. My research looked at the relationship between the germ sciences and the British workplace from 1880 - 1940.
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I published my first monograph with Routledge -- Germs in the English Workplace, c,1880-1940 -- in 2021.
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I have worked in various capacities in the museum industry for the past ten years, where I have built up a strong skillset in research-led outreach working with institutions such as The Florence Nightingale Museum, The Hunterian Museum, The Science Museum, and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. I have also worked as a freelance historical consultant.
Education
2008-2012
University of Glasgow
Master of Arts in History (First)
2012-2013
King's College London
Master of Arts in Nineteenth Century Studies (Distinction). Recipient of the Nineteenth Century Studies prize.
2013-2018
King's College London
PhD in History. Recipient of AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award.
Public Engagement
Working with schools as part of the Mobile Museum project
I worked regularly with project team members to deliver training to both teachers and primary school pupils to help them set up their own school museums. I also co-authored the Curating A School Museum handbook.
Kew Open House 2020
Designed and delivered a two day outreach event on school museums as part of Open House London.
Co-curator at the Florence Nightingale Museum
In 2012-2013 I researched and designed an exhibition The Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Celebrity on Florence Nightingale and celebrity culture.
These are just some examples of my public engagement work. For more please see my curriculum vitae.
Publications
There are multiple vantage points from which historians have observed the ways in which both diseased and healthy bodies (as well as their constituent parts) have served as tools of knowledge generation, instruction and coercion in the hands of medical practitioners. From spaces of formal, specialist education such as the medical school to more informal environments and modes of learning, there is a seemingly never-ending array of environments, actors and materials to consider when trying to construct a representative survey of the two fields. Focusing primarily on the British case, this article takes a selective view of the different kinds of environments, actors and approaches historians have used to understand pedagogies of health and medicine in the modern period before suggesting new avenues of potential inquiry.
This chapter discusses Kew’s role as a major supplier of plant specimens to London classrooms. Between 1885 and 1916 more than a hundred schools in the capital were recipients of plants from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, providing teachers with teaching aids, and students with a chance to encounter the botanical products of Britain and its empire. By pinpointing Kew’s contribution to curricular initiatives such as nature study, I show how the growing presence of plants in schools formed part of a broader national and transnational phenomenon – one that simultaneously stressed the benefits of pedagogy-through-nature, and the instrumental possibilities of museums both within and without the classroom.
This book looks at how the workplace was transformed through a greater awareness of the roles that germs played in English working lives from c.1880 to 1945. Cutting across a diverse array of occupational settings – such as the domestic kitchen, the milking shed, the factory, and the Post Office – it offers new perspectives on the history of the germ sciences. It brings to light the ways in which germ scientists sought to transform English working lives through new types of technical and educational interventions that sought to both eradicate and instrumentalise germs. It then asks how we can measure and judge the success of such interventions by tracing how workers responded to the potential applications of the germ sciences through their participation in friendly societies, trade unions, colleges, and volunteer organisations. The result is a more diverse history of the peoples, politics, and practices that went into shaping the germ sciences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.
An open access article from my time as Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC funded Mobile Museum project ​at Royal Holloway and Kew Gardens. Discusses plants and pedagogy at the intersection of the material culture of both museum and classroom.
This article examines the emergence of postal pathology in Britain from around 1895 onwards. It focuses on the impact of laboratory-centred diagnostic practices on the working experiences and practices of medical and laboratory practitioners, Post Office management and Post Office workers as they operated within the medical marketplace.
This article discusses the evolution of the milking competition in interwar Britain as it came to be instrumentalised by those interested in securing a clean milk supply for the nation. Clean milk competitions came to simultaneously educate and discipline British dairy workers by working to redefine milking skill with the help of the laboratory sciences. However the venture was a contentious one, wherein competition participants would often resist the meanings and methods that were coming to be employed in the quest for clean milk.
This article seeks to explore the ways in which education functioned as a core tenet of the anti-tuberculosis (TB) movement in early twentieth-century Britain. Education can be seen to have taken on a unique role in the therapeutic regimes for TB from the late 1880s with Robert Philips’s Edinburgh Dispensary system. The focus on the ‘social management’ of the disease, however, continued to evolve throughout this period as it interacted with a broad and varied landscape of therapeutic provision for TB.