Anglo-Hellenic Contacts
My research analyses contacts (both in-person and textual) between Greek and English individuals and communities, c.1450-1700, across a geographical area ranging from the Middle East to North America, focusing particularly upon the English, Venetian, and Ottoman Empires. I have questioned both simplistic stereotypes of a Christian West and Islamic East and artificial scholarly boundaries between the Western Reformations and Eastern Christianity. Through recasting models of the transcultural impact of confessionalisation, my research provides fresh insights into early modern ethno-cultural and religious identities, migration and minorities. It thereby contributes to the recent historiographical shift towards highlighting the ethnic and cultural diversity of early modern societies and recovering the lived experience of minority groups, helping us better understand the value of intercultural communication and its complex and contested histories. I have published two peer-reviewed journal articles on this topic, and am currently writing my monograph, Invisible Greeks (under contract with Routledge), which is the first full-length study of early modern Anglo-Hellenic encounters.
I began work on this research area during my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of East Anglia (2020-23), and continued it during my Munby Fellowship in Global Bibliography at Cambridge University (2023-24) and Humfrey Wanley Visiting Fellowship at the Bodleian Library (2024), and am now concluding the project as a Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute.
Cradley
Prior to taking up my Leverhulme Fellowship, and after finishing my PhD, I was the Principal Investigator for Victoria County History’s project on the parish of Cradley (Herefordshire). The volume is co-authored with the medievalist Dr Fergus Eskola-Oakes: I am the lead author of the book, responsible for 80% (the early modern and modern sections). Cradley was published by University of London Press in June 2025.
The volume explores the parish’s economic, social, religious, political, and landscape history, highlighting the ways in which the parish has long been a site of particular historical significance. The study is an important contribution to English local history, showing how Cradley exemplifies both the economic prosperity that could be enjoyed by parishes in fertile Eastern Herefordshire, and the impact of changes in the national economy upon rural, agrarian parishes. As a microhistory of a rural and highly eco-diverse parish, it also speaks to the topical interest in environmental history and wider issues of conservation and rural biodiversity.
Martyrdom in Early Modern England
My PhD research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. My thesis, entitled ‘Martyrs’ Blood in Reformation England’, was the first close comparison of English Protestant and Catholic constructions of martyrdom across the sixteenth century. I argued that the Reformations saw the emergence of two, diametrically opposed models of martyrdom, which reflected confessionalisation of notions of gender, the body, materiality, and even the functioning of time. I have published some of my research findings in a peer-reviewed journal article and a chapter in an edited volume. My thesis is available online here.