My work focuses on the history of political ideas – mainly in Britain and Europe, and mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My approach emphasises the power of ideas in shaping history, and how the ideas of the past continue to help us make sense of today’s predicaments.  

I am especially interested in the history of ideas of democracy. My current book project, Democracy’s Monarch: Caesarism and the Social Question from the Enlightenment to the First World War (under contract with Princeton University Press) aims to change the way that we think about the history of democracy during the long nineteenth century. The book also explores the entanglements of politics and economics, and how capitalism, plutocracy and inequality transform and constrain the possibilities for democracy today.

My work on Caesarism has appeared in leading academic journals, including Journal of the History of Ideas, Modern Intellectual History, and Intellectual History Review. Another piece – “U.S. President or American Caesar” – appeared just prior to the 2024 U.S. elections in the popular history magazine History Today. 

My first book, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: the Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Harvard University Press, 2013) examined Ferguson’s obsession with the ancient world and how this mapped on to his understanding of modern Europe’s future in the era of the American and French Revolutions. This book was the joint winner of the István Hont Book Prize in 2014.

At Sussex I have been co-organiser of two international conferences. In January 2026 I co-organised the major international conference Common Sense at 250, which re-examined, explored, commemorated, and reimagined the ideas of Thomas Paine’s famous 1776 pamphlet Common Sense. The conference proceedings will appear in a co-edited collection published by the University of Virginia Press in 2028. In 2016 I co-organised the interdisciplinary conference Resistance in Intellectual History and Political Thought. The papers appeared in a special issue of History of European Ideas, which I edited.

Between 2021 and 2025 I served as Head of Department for History, first as Co-Head (with Claudia Siebrecht, 2021-24) and subsequently as HoD (2024-25).

I am currently an External Examiner for the University of Oxford (Modern History). I am a member of the Advisory Council of the Global Intellectual History Unit at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul. I am an Advisory Board member for the journal Comparative Political Theory. I was the project partner for the University of Lausanne’s Enlightenment Agrarian Republics project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2017-2022). I was the Sussex PI for the British Academy International Fellowship “A Global Intellectual History of Reform: Jeremy Bentham and John Bowring’s Representation of and Influence on Siam”, held by Dr Ployjai Pintobtang March-June 2025.

Before joining Sussex, I previously taught and worked at the University of Cambridge, where I held a British Academic Postdoctoral Fellowship, at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and at University College London.

I welcome inquiries from PhD applicants seeking to pursue research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history.