Biography
I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2016 with a BA and MSci in Natural Sciences (History and Philosophy of Science). My final-year dissertation dealt with the development of working-class scientific education in 1820s Britain, focussing on the political tussle between moderate reformists and more hardline radicals over the purpose and future prospects for the movement.
My doctoral research will expand this study to a more general treatment of the politics of knowledge in Britain at the dawning of the Machine Age. In essence, I will be examining how 'popular science' was carved out from the wider tumult of popular knowledge, secured as politically and religiously benign, and recruited into the knowledge politics of Whig reformism. While this doctrine came to dominate British politics on a national scale, I will argue that it has a distinctively Scottish inheritance.
Other academic interests
Working-class history; trades unionism; press freedom; the theatre of dissent; surveillance and the state