Email: [email protected]

I am an environmental historian of modern Britain. My work explores environmental change and its impacts on communities, places, and politics. My book Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain is published by Manchester University Press in October 2025. It is the first academic history of wind energy in the UK. From the industrial revolution to the aftermath of war, through energy crises and the changing politics of the late twentieth century, it explores how energy has shaped a nation - and how a nation is reflected and refracted through energy. It brings together years of research which has also informed two major articles.  ‘Limits of Power: Wind Energy, Orkney and the post-war British state’ shows that there was state interest in wind energy immediately after the Second World War, when it was seen to be a solution for connecting remote communities to electricity in the new welfare state.  ''When's a Gale a Gale?' Understanding Wind as an Energetic Force in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain' identifies how the development of wind turbine technology was a generative process, feeding not just into the national grid but into local identities and notions of place. 

I also have research interests in water as a site, agent and archive of history. Work on rivers and their inhabitants, including the surfers of the Severn Bore, explores the interconnected flows of identity, memory, and place in watery settings. I am the Water section editor of OUP's Environmental Change and the Human Experience Intersection, and sit on the editorial board of Water History journal.

The subject which started me down an academic career path was the rise of environmentalism within the British military. I was doctoral student on the ‘Militarized Landscapes in Britain, France and US’ project and examined five British training areas in the south west and Wales. My thesis identified the rise of military environmentalism as a land management practice developed by the Ministry of Defence. This work was published as a book, An Environmental History of the UK Defence Estate, 1945-present in 2012.  

From 2018-2021 I co-directed the University of Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities.

In 2022 - 2023 I was a Green Transitions Fellow at the University of Stavanger. 

From 2021 - 2025 I was Vice-President of the European Society for Environmental History. 

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

Teaching

I teach a range of units in the Department of History at undergraduate level.

I am Director of the MA Environmental Humanities. You can watch a 3min film about the programme here. 

Current Research supervision

Rebecca Tyson (PhD, History), 'Geographies of the Norman Conquest: A new environmental history of cross-Channel interactions in the eleventh century’ (co-supervised with Ben Pohl)

Willow Ross, 'Waste on notice: Nuclear activism and creative resistance to radioactive waste in so-called Australia and the United Kingdom' (co-supervised with Joe Gerlach, Emily O'Gorman, and Donna Houston).

I welcome postgraduate research proposals on the environmental history of modern Britain and interdisciplinary environmental humanities topics that connect with my research interests.