Research interests

• British Cultural History
• Gladstone and Victorian Intellectual History
• History of Museums
• Late Ottoman Empire/Middle East and 1923 Lausanne Treaty
• History of the Oil Industry

Current research

The Met is one of the greatest museums in the world, housing the artefacts whose images are instantly-recognizable ciphers of civilisation. But what about those who made and restored, bought and sold, catalogued, guarded, wore and visited those artefacts?

Published by Columbia University Press in October 2024, The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People is the story of the people behind and in front of the familiar objects. The story of how a diverse set of communities in "the third great city of the civilized world" collected an astonishing wealth of remarkable objects, and made them their own — in the process creating a world-class institution displaying the very best of human creativity. With the Met under fire for allegedly failing to serve a diverse public, an account of the institution that puts the people's stories front and centre could not be more timely.

While the book will be structured broadly chronologically, chapters are organized around these communities rather than directors' "reigns", landmark extensions or bequests. Opening chapters consider the role of artists and "robber barons", but also children and newly-arrived residents of Manhattan's Lower East Side. The emergence of the American Wing is placed in the context of 1920s debates surrounding immigration, while that of a modern curatorial profession is revisited, highlighting the women among the "Museum Men". Later chapters introduce communities which have been entirely overlooked by traditional museum biographies, such as guards, suburbanites, tourists and the black and Latinx communities. The book concludes by considering the Met's troubled 150th celebrations in 2020, highlighting the many analogies with earlier episodes in its history (for all the storm and stress, the Met has been here before, and will be again). It makes the case for such "universal museums" as cherished crucibles, not of exclusionary identity politics, but of shared curiosity and wonder at human creativity.

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.  

Prizes