I defended my AHRC-funded DPhil thesis in 2025 at Oriel College, Oxford. The thesis studied the influence of a particular tradition of teaching practical geography, employed at the English universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on several authors of prose. This tradition figured geography as a species of mental discipline, training its students to respond prudently and judiciously to an unpredictable, confusing, and strife-ridden world, rather than simply to memorise the locations of particular places or understand specific mathematical projections. Eschewing more traditionally ‘geographical’ genres such as travel-writing and world-history, I instead showed how such authors as Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Fuller, and John Aubrey assigned roles to the language and cartographic products of geography which can only make sense against a neglected canon of Latinate textbooks and other quotidian teaching-documents. These authors allotted a central and often-surprising place to geographical language in their ‘scientific’ methods, ethics, pedagogy, and prose-styles: I contended that this was due to their educational background. A monograph based on this thesis is in the later stages of review at Oxford University Press.
Very broadly, I am especially interested in how early modern prose-style both shaped and was shaped by certain disciplinary and intellectual-historical contexts. I am in the early stages of a new avenue of research into the ‘middle style’ of early modern prose writing, which influentially (and misleadingly) became associated with the apparently ‘moderate’ national character of Englishmen, in both general disposition and churchmanship. This research will consider both the nature and defining features of this ‘middle style’ in prose, and its later use by historians and literary critics to project a myth of essentially moderate ‘Englishness’.
I have published work in literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of science (a list of publications is below). I would be happy to chat with anybody interested in the above topics.
Publications:
- 2026: ‘A Defence of Humanist Geography at the University of Douai: The Preface to James Cheyne’s De geographia libri duo (1576)’, Lias 51.1-2 (forthcoming 2026). 18,000 words.
- 2026: ‘Queries and Quaestiones: Edward Lhwyd between Natural History and Natural Philosophy’, Annals of Science (early access 2026): pp. 1-32. 20,000 words.
- 2024: ‘The Fate of Philologus: Learning and Prattle in Seventeenth-Century Religious Dialogue’, The Seventeenth Century 40.1 (2025): pp. 59-85. 15,000 words.
- 2023: ‘Material Metaphors for Literary Form: Robert Burton’s ‘Perused’ Copy of Theatrum urbium Italicarum (1599)’. Renaissance Studies 38.2 (2024), pp. 185-205. 9,000 words.
Reviews:
- 2024: ‘Renaissance habitus: Three Books on Pedagogy and Literature’, Extended Review Essay on Katrin Ettenhuber, The Logical Renaissance; Kathy Eden, Rhetorical Renaissance; Katherine Little, Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England, COMITATUS 55 (2024): pp. 247-62. 6,000 words.
I took my BA in 2019 from University College London. I then came to Oxford for an MSt in English (1550-1700), funded by the Violet Vaughan-Morgan Studentship and completed in 2021. I completed my DPhil in 2025, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Council’s Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. After completing my DPhil, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, and a lecturer in English at St Peter’s College. I am associate editor of Imago Mundi, the international journal for the history of cartography.
