Biography
As an intellectual historian, my work explores political, moral and religious ideas in Europe from around the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, with an eye to charting their influence on the transformation from early modernity to the modern world. Recently, I have begun work on a project concerned with the origins of ideas about individualism in nineteenth-century Europe. By using as of yet untouched archives in France, I have uncovered the connected discourses of the threat of individualism, the promises of corporative society and the belief in imposed modes of governance through administration.
Alongside this, I have extensive experience in community-based projects between universities and the cities in which they exist. From July 2023 to July 2024, I co-directed a research project between the Centre for Theology and Community (London) and Campion Hall, Oxford, on the role of open, horizontal decision making, popular assemblies and grassroots social theory in East London.
Previsouly, I taught at the London School of Economics and at the University of Cambridge. I received my BA in history from University College London, an MSc in political sociology from LSE and a PhD in history from King's College, Cambridge. From January to July, 2022, I was Visiting Research Fellow at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France.
Articles:
‘Jules Michelet and the sources of morality’, History of European Ideas.
‘Of Sublimity, Primitives and Civilisation: Giambattista Vico on Modern Philosophy and Political Decay’, Modern Intellectual History.
‘Accounting for Intellectual Traditions in the History of Ideas: Synchronicity, Diachronicity, and a Pragmatic Corrective’, Raisons politiques.
Book Chapters
‘Sin, grace and secular history: Pierre Paul Royer-Collard’s criticism of the anti-sacrilege law of 1825’ in Aude Attuel (ed.) An Intellectual History of Liberal Catholicism in Western Europe, 1789-1870 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024).
Reviews, essays and journalism (selection)
‘Self-Consciously Secular’, Commonweal, 01/09/2023.
‘When Italy’s Communists Painted Naples Red’, Jacobin Magazine, 21/01/2021.
‘Exclusive: In defiance of travel ban, US seminary in Rome ordered to send students back to home dioceses’, Novena News, 16/03/2020.
‘Analysis: Salvini and the Italian Church: who’s using whom?’, Novena News, 28/02/2020.
‘Catholic Traditionalists look to politics for new sources of influence’, Novena News, 05/02/2020.
‘National populist organisation behind traditionalist opposition to Pope Francis’, WherePeterIs, 07/11/2019.
‘The Bolsonaro influencer seeking to sway the Catholic summit’. WherePeterIs, 26/10/2019.
‘Two associates of Pope Francis accuse right-wing American Christians of practising ‘apocalyptic‘ politics’, The Tablet, 14/07/2017.
‘Vatican investigates Catholic group after exorcism and claim that Francis is Devil’s man’, The Tablet, 26/06/2017.
‘City banks are getting ready to ditch London, it’s only a matter of time’, CafèBabel, 09/10/2016.
‘More content on the Continent’, Quadrapheme, 08/07/2016.
‘The View from Europe’, Quadrapheme, 04/07/2016.
‘The Devil is in the detail: Why Pope Francis really rejected the donation from Argentinian president’, The Tablet, 16/06/2016.