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My research centres on the intellectual history of the twentieth-century United States. My London Arts & Humanities Partnership-funded PhD specifically explores themes of race, memory, and liberalism through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). Incorporating methodologies from history, Black Studies, Memory Studies, the sociology of knowledge, and critical pedagogy, I’m interested in how historical writing has both justified and been used to contest ideas about race and what it means to be an American. More broadly, my research focuses on the role of racism within mid-twentieth-century academia in silencing radical and antiracist ideas, particularly within the American South.
Before arriving at UCL, I studied for a BA(Hons) in History and an MPhil in American History at the University of Cambridge. I’m more broadly interested in understandings of American nationhood, and am currently preparing for publication two articles deriving from my MPhil dissertation on the Gerald Ford administration’s commemoration of the 1976 Bicentennial of American Independence.
My research often centres on the role of history in public life. It has been the privilege of my PhD to contribute towards several transnational organisations, societies, and public-facing projects. I am a passionate podcaster, having interviewed figures from academia, NGOs, and the arts and heritage sectors for U.S. Studies Online and the authors of recently published books in American Studies for the New Books Network, the world’s largest book review podcast network. In 2023, I served as a British Research Council Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and I am now a Graduate Representative for the Southern Historical Association and Coordinator of its International Graduate Network.
In 2024 I was invited to co-convene the 2023-2024 History Lab Research Seminar for the Institute of Historical Research and the 2024 UCL Americas Research Network Conference Historical Roots and Modern Realities: Nationalism across the Americas. I also teach as a Post Graduate Teaching Assistant on ‘The Making of Modern America, 1920-Present’, serve as a Research Assistant on the international research collaboration ‘War and the State”, and edit blogs and podcasts as a Contributing Editor for the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. Finally, I've followed my interests in pedagogy and the role of academic knowledge in policy making by working as a UKRI Policy Intern in the Royal Society’s Education Team (starting Autumn 2024).
Awards | Grants | Scholarships | Funding
- 2024: British Association of American Studies Remote Research Support Fund.
- 2023: Gerald Ford Foundation Travel Grant
- 2023: Southern Historical Association Graduate Council Funding
- 2023: London Arts & Humanities Partnership Research Support Fund
- 2022: John Hope Franklin Center Travel Award (Duke University).
- 2022: Institute of the Americas Postgraduate Research Award (University College London),
- 2022: European Association of American Studies Transatlantic Grant.
- 2021: London Arts & Humanities Partnership Three-Year Doctoral Funding.
Selected publications
- 2023: “Review: Memory and Autobiography: Explorations at the Limits by Leonor Arfuch”, H-Biography.
- 2023: “John Hope Franklin and WWII as A Crisis of Democracy”, African American Intellectual History Society Black Perspectives.
- 2022: “Review: Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa by Jovan Scott Lewis”, LSE Review of Books.
- 2022: “Review: Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis Givens”, Reviews in History.
- 2022: “Review: American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea by Ian Tyrrell”, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Volume 42, Issue 1, June/July 2022.
- 2022: “Review: The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives by Adolph Reed Jr”, US Studies Online.
- 2022: “‘Brilliantly Devised, Grossly Packaged Confusion’: Eames’s ‘World of Franklin & Jefferson’ Exhibition and Reclaiming Revolution during America’s Post-Traumatic Decade”, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.
- 2021: “As America Looks Ahead To Its 250th Anniversary, The Nation’s Past Is Likely To Be Just As Contested As Its Present”, LSE’s American Politics and Policy Blog.
Selected papers given
- 2024: “The Realism of Inequality and the Idealism of True Democracy”: John Hope Franklin, HBCUs, and the Pursuit of Educational Citizenship in Early-Twentieth-Century Black Educational Life”, Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States 2024 Annual Conference, University of Southampton.
- 2023: “More Pride than Justice’: Student Protest, Black Power, and the Shape of Black History c.1960-1975’, Roosevelt Institute for American Studies Fall 2023 PhD Symposium, Middelburg, The Netherlands.
- 2023: “John Hope Franklin’s Strange Career in Southern History”, Southern Historical Association Annual Conference, Charleston, North Carolina.
- 2023: “John Hope Franklin and the United Kingdom”, From Slavery to Freedom 75th Anniversary Conference, Durham, North Carolina.
- 2023: “‘Not As a Negro, Not Even as a Southerner, But as a Historian’: John Hope Franklin, Public Histories, and the Dilemmas of Black Southern Identity”, British Association of American Studies Annual Conference, Keele University.
- 2023: “John Hope Franklin, Activist Histories, and the Southern Historical Association as a Site of Post-War Racial Conservatism”, Boston University, Stanford University, University of California, Emory University and UCL Joint American History Collaboration, Stanford University.
- 2023: “The Dilemma of the Exceptional: John Hope Franklin, Educational Integration, and Black History’s Popularisation Dilemmas in 1963”, Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States Winter Symposium, University of Oxford.
