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Before coming to Gloucestershire, I held a Government of Ireland Fellowship at University College Cork (2011-13), a Junior (2014-15) and then Mid-Career Fellowship (2017-19) at the University of Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study, as well as being a Research Fellow in Politics (2018-21) as part of the York Leverhulme project ‘Rethinking Civil Society: history, theory, critique’. I have also been a Lecturer in Early Modern History at Lancaster (2015-16), Durham (2016-17) and York (2021-22).
My work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, History of European Ideas, The Sixteenth Century Journal & Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. My first book, Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland, was published in 2015 and reissued in paperback in 2017. I am now in the process of completing a second monograph, provisionally entitled Diabolical Liberties in Early Modern England and Ireland: A Conceptual History. My new research project examines ‘(Mis)translating Civil Society and the State: Europe and the Thirty Years’ War’.
My teaching concerns Early Modern British & European History. I address social, cultural and intellectual history from the Renaissance and the European Reformation(s) up to the Enlightenment.
My research makes use of comparative history.
One strand of my work examines the breakdown of English political vocabularies in Ireland as English government there sought to lay what it perceived to be the necessary conditions for a functional ‘civil society’. In doing so, I have charted the early emergence of an abstract idea of ‘the state’ and its institutions in Elizabethan Ireland. I am now addressing the way in which the problem of an unredeemed ‘will’ gave form to a deeply contested idea of individual liberty in both Ireland and England during the first half of the 17th century.
The other strand of my research on German, English & French letter exchanges and pamphlet translations, concerning the Thirty Years’ War, makes use of the problem of the “mistranslation” of key political terminology. In doing so, I seek to excavate the underlying differences in meaning and intent which lay behind the ostensibly common European vocabularies of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. I seek to uncover different European versions of early modernity.
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