Contact
Teaching Summary
I teach across the Geography degree programme at Nottingham, including:
- Political Geography (Module convenor)
- Exploring Human Geography
- Globalisation: Economy, Space and Power
- European Urban Geographies (Berlin field course)
- Dissertations
- Research Tutorials
- First Year Tutorials
Research Summary
I am a historical and political geographer and my research intersects around three key themes:
Internationalism: I study the history of internationalist thought. Most recently, this work has examined the central role played by international conferences in the development of internationalism in the 20th-century. My focus centres the perspectives of those who have been traditionally absent in histories of internationalism (e.g. black activists, pacifists). This work has been the focus of an edited collection Placing Internationalism (Bloomsbury, 2021), a special issue of Political Geography, as well as articles in Transactions of the IBG and Political Geography.
Race: My work also examines the geographies of race in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the United States. I'm interested in how race was constructed as an international category, including through forms of pan-africanism and black internationalism. I'm currently researching how the emergence of global governance, from the League of Nations onwards, was mobilised by black activists to challenge racism and colonialism. I've written on these topics in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of American Studies, and History Workshop Journal.
Archives: I'm interested in how we do historical research in geography, particularly the political and economic infrastructures of archives. My work questions how the archival record has shaped our understandings of internationalism and race historically (both concepts that sit awkwardly in relation to state-centric recording practices), and how we might interrogate the expanding role of digital archive technologies. I have written about these topics in Progress in Human Geography, the Journal of Historical Geography and Area.
To date, this research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (2009-14), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2015-19; 2021), the Royal Geographical Society (2021) and the British Academy / Wolfson Foundation (2022-25). As part of my current project, I am working on a book-length account of how race relations were internationalised after the First World War.
I sit on the editorial board of Geography Compass, the academic advisory board of Nottingham Contemporary, lead the School's Cultural and Historical Geography Research Theme, and I am Director the University's Urban Culture Network.
Selected Publications