I predominantly work on intellectual history and the history of political thought from circa 1450 to 1800, especially varieties of republicanism. My current research centres on the English republic and English republicanism in global context from the 1640s to the 1720s. I am particularly interested in the relationship between English republican political, theological, and economic thinking and how English republicans wrote about Pacific Asia.

Further themes in my ongoing work on English republicanism include theories of liberty and rights, natural law and virtue ethics, republican metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophies of love, (anti-)democracy and popular sovereignty, transnational and cross-confessional networks, the intersection of religion and politics, diplomacy and international thought, and the textual afterlives of English republican ideas in the Enlightenment(s) and age of revolutions. Connected to this, I also work on the twentieth-century historiography of English republicanism and intellectual history.

My Ph.D. thesis, ‘De republica saeculari: The Architectonic of Freedom and the Temporal Republic of Algernon Sidney’ (defended in March 2024) offers a reassessment of Sidney’s thought, activities, and networks, and does so alongside introducing a range of previous uncited manuscripts and engaging with scholarship in multiple languages. For my Ph.D. I undertook research in over thirty archives across eight states. My thesis has implications for how we understand English republicanism and political thought in the seventeenth century and beyond. I am currently revising my Ph.D. into a monograph.

Finally, further to my work on the English republicanism, I am also interested in the European, specifically English, encounter with Japan in the late Sengoku and early Edo periods. I have undertaken research on seventeenth-century English-Japanese relations, particularly the ways in which English observers and agents within Japan conceptualised its politics, constitution, and social as well as economic structures.

I have presented widely, including at conferences hosted in France (Rouen), Germany (Darmstadt), Italy (Florence, Turin, Venice), Japan (Tokyo, Yamanakako), Lithuania (Vilnius), the Netherlands (Leiden), and the United Kingdom (Belfast, Cambridge, Newcastle).

I also have an interest in historical methodology, the history of intellectual history as a discipline, and political theory.

Teaching

I have assisted faculty in the following postgraduate seminars:

– Intellectual and Cultural History (Departmental Seminar, 2019-2020)

– The Circulation of Ideas and Information (Research Seminar, 2019-2020)

In March 2019 I was awarded a ‘Teaching in Higher Education’ certificate from the EUI following the completion of a peer-reviewed special training course with instructors based at the EUI and University College London.

Further Research Experience

In 2023 and 2024 I have worked as a research assistant to William Caferro (Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, Vanderbilt University) for a project on the economic history of fourteenth-century Italy. Prior to this, from 2020 to 2022, I assisted Peter Sposato (Indiana University Kokomo) research martial culture in medieval Tuscany.