My research explores British, imperial, and colonial cultures, with a particular focus on the politics of race, gender and class. I integrate historical geography with feminist and social history to examine how concepts such as “protection,” “civilization,” and domesticity were spatially organized and lived across the British world. My doctoral and post-doctoral research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council), the Leverhulme Trust and the Sussex Research Development Fund.

In monographs, book chapters and peer-reviewed articles my research has explored two interconnected areas: domestic service and imperial power, and humanitarianism as imperial governance.

In terms of domestic service and imperial power, I examine how everyday household relations articulated race, gender, and class across metropole and colony. My article “To glut a menial’s grudge: reconfiguring the Ilbert Bill Controversy of 1883” (Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2013) reframes debates on race, gender, and legal authority in the British Raj, showing how domestic service and colonial law intersected in shaping imperial hierarchies.‘“That unit of civilisation”: British employers and their servants in the Indian Empire 1850–1914’ (Identities, 2014) explores how domestic hierarchies reinforced imperial authority, while ‘Abuse and agency: defining the limits of acceptable behaviour in the servant/employer relationship, India and Britain 1850–1890’ (in Colonization and Domestic Service, Routledge, 2015) interrogates violence and “acceptable” behaviour in servant–employer relations. My monograph In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) offers a comparative history of master/mistress–servant relations across Britain and the empire, showing domestic labour as central to imperial power. As Samita Sen notes in Journal of British Studies, the book “makes a crucial contribution to scholarship on British and imperial domestic service, showing the complex layering of categories such as gender, race, class, and caste in domestic relations across the metropole and the colony.” Satya Shikha Chakraborty, reviewing in Cultural & Social History, praises its “innovative model of bringing the metropole and colony in the same frame” and its strong contribution to understanding race–class–gender intersections in imperial domesticity.

In terms of humanitarianism as imperial governance: I have co-authored widely cited work on humanitarian discourses and Indigenous “protection” in the context of Empire, such as ‘Trajectories of protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in early 19th century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’ (New Zealand Geographer, 2008; cited ~60 times) and ‘Masculinity, ‘race’, and the family in the colonies: protecting Aborigines in the early nineteenth century’ (Gender, Place & Culture, 2009). My co-authored monograph Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014, with Alan Lester) traces the emergence of humanitarian governance in the nineteenth-century British Empire, and demonstrates how humanitarian ideals interacted with imperial rule. It has been commended as “a compelling and intellectually stimulating history of colonial humanitarianism” and “an important dimension of colonial governmentality” (Ganter, Aboriginal History; Batten, Imperial & Global Forum).

Across my work, I position humanitarianism and domesticity as integral within the organisation of imperial power. I show how the ideas and practices that constituted humanitarianism and domesticity were implicated in place-making and identity formation on a scale from the household to the local, and on to the national and imperial. My research is widely cited in humanitarian and British Empire studies and informs debates on colonial governance, intimacy, and global inequality.

My teaching is informed by my research, and my teaching practice is interactive and inclusive, shaped by my understanding of learning as a lifelong, collaborative process. I teach a range of core and elective undergraduate modules and supervise post-graduate research projects. Modules I currently convene are the first year core module The Geographer's Toolkit, the second year Las Vegas and Mojave Desert field class, and the final year elective Class, Community, Nation. I also teach into the first year Foundation course Local Lives.