Research interests

• The Chevalière Deon and her place in trans history
• History of Museums and Arts Television
• Late Ottoman Empire/Middle East and 1923 Lausanne Treaty
• History of the Oil Industry
• William Ewart Gladstone and Victorian Intellectual History

Current research

Author, envoy, soldier, spy, the Chevalière Deon (1728-1810) crossed boundaries of gender and nation, moving between Britain and France, and male and female. For thirty years, in peace and in war, the Chevalière served the French crown as censor, secret agent, dragoon officer and diplomat - presenting as a man. After her "conversion" (her term) she spent the following thirty years as a celebrity, famed for giving virtuoso displays of swordswomanship wearing her signature black dress. Londoners referred to her as "the wonder of her sex", and took pride in having provided Deon with a refuge at a time when she faced the menace of kidnap and incarceration in the Bastille at the hands of King Louis XV's agents.

     Beginning in the 1770s Deon began drafting and redrafting a series of life writings in a range of genres. Some took the form of legal depositions, others memoir, still others adopted more dramatic form, built around dialogues with notable men and women of her age (some of these were individuals Deon had met in person, while others were figures she had not had any contact with). A short autobiography appeared in 1779, but otherwise none of these texts appeared in print during Deon's lifetime - despite Deon securing advances from at least two London publishers eager to help her tell her story. An edition of a few of these texts was published in English translation in 2001.

     Deon did, however, commission portrait engravings and mezzotints depicting herself in both male and female costume, as well as in the character of Pallas Athene. And, of course, contemporary observers on both sides of the Channel produced their own texts and images of her. Many of these cannot easily be characterized as either celebratory or satirical. Others were highly invasive of Deon's privacy, not least a stipple engraving of her penis published in London immediately after her death, recording an examination of her corpse by a group of surgeons.

     Historians of trans are usually reliant on the texts produced by such self-described cis male "experts" (surgeons such as those who examined Deon's body, sexologists such as Havelock Ellis), often for want of texts and images produced by their subjects themselves. It is certainly possible to read such sources against the grain, and recover something of the trans experience. Deon's case is unusual in that we have hundreds of pages of unpublished life writings, as well as diaries that record what Deon did, day by day, for more than forty years of her life. Deon was also a prolific libelliste and author, publishing a thirteen-volume set of Les Loisirs du Chevalier D'Eon. Hers was a highly curated self, and this curation included writing herself into a history of femmes fortes ("strong women"). Deon strongly identified with Joan of Arc, the Amazons and medieval saints who had "disguised their sex in the service of God". Deon could be seen as both trans and as a historian of trans avant la lettre.

     I first began working on Deon in 2001, exploring her relationship with her friend John Wilkes, a radical politician and journalist whose rhetoric and career were in some ways analogous (contemporaries certainly spotted the resemblances). I published this research in the English Historical Review in 2003. Along with Simon Burrows and a team from the University of Leeds (where much of Deon's archive is held), I then co-edited a 2007 volume entitled The Chevalier D'Eon and His Worlds.

     As the title we chose indicates, our understanding of Deon has evolved. In my forthcoming biography I will be using the pronoun she/her when addressing the period after Deon's "conversion". When addressing the earlier years, I will not be using any gendered pronouns. I refer to her as Deon rather than D'Eon as that is the form her family used, and which Deon herself used for much of her life.

     Deon presents remarkable opportunities and challenges to any would-be biographer, and I welcome opportunities to discuss these with members of the trans community, its allies as well as with museum curators and others active in the public history space. If you would like to be part of this conversation, please email me.

All my modules are delivered using the “flipped classroom” model: hands-on, skills-based workshops, peer assessment and role-plays replace traditional lectures, leading students beyond the seminar room walls, across the university, city and wider region. Seminars take in the relatively familiar (Hartley Special Collections), the unusual (Southampton Crematorium, Exxon’s Fawley oil refinery) and the experimental (a role-play exercise using Social Sciences’ Bloomberg Suite).

     With the support of the university’s Estates & Facilities department and Southampton City Art Gallery I have designed two new modules which are changing how our undergraduates interact with their university and city: HIST1181 Room for Improvement invites them to explore the history of higher education in Britain by studying the design of familiar campus buildings, bringing the backdrop of their lives centre stage. HIST2230 Curating History sees students conceive, research and hang their own temporary exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery. Now in its third year, this module has been featured on ArtUK, and provides undergraduates with a unique (within the UK, at least) opportunity to collaborate with an important public collection of British art. 

     As part of my role as founder of The Lausanne Project I am also involved in reforming history teaching at high school level in Greece and Turkey. A recent workshop in Lausanne brought Turkish and Greek teachers together to co-create new lesson plans, intended to challenge nationalistic narratives and foster critical thinking skills.

Born and raised in New York, I studied History and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, spending a year at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany. After a Masters in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute I moved to Cambridge for my doctorate. Before coming to Southampton I was Junior Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and briefly worked for the BBC, as Specialist Researcher on the 2007 Michael Buerk series Trade Roots, which investigated ties between British institutions and the slave trade.

     Alongside my Southampton teaching I have taught history of economic thought at the École Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d'Angers (ESSCA) and held Visiting Fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Huntington Library, Lewis Walpole Library and Princeton University Library. To celebrate the fortieth anniversaries of the landmark BBC television series Civilisation (1969) and Ways of Seeing (1972) I organized a series of screenings and talks at the National Gallery, British Film Institute and National Gallery of Art, Washington. I wrote the BFI TV Classics volume on Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and have published essays and articles on its relationship with John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

Prizes