I am a literary and cultural historian of science interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about Earth’s history. In recent years, I have been working increasingly closely with natural history collections and I am currently a Research Associate in Natural History Humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. My project at the Sedgwick Museum, ‘Re-Excavating the Cambridge School of Geology, 1850–1914’, uses the University's collections both to explore how women entered the world of professional palaeontology and to examine the changing place of Christianity in Victorian science. Previously, I was Deputy Leader of Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum, London.
Others topics of my research have included occult palaeontology, Young-Earth Creationism, non-Darwinian conceptions of evolution in literary culture, Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, and the popularisation of dinosaurs. My second monograph, Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2025), was an output of my Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, held at the University of Birmingham between 2020 and 2023.
My previous book, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), built on my University of Leicester PhD, which was awarded in 2019. I have published articles in various academic journals, such as Twentieth-Century Literature, Archives of Natural History, and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in media for general audiences, including History Today and the Public Domain Review.
