Using historical sources, I excavate the mental worlds of the past across a wide range of time.

Early modern temporality: In my PhD dissertation ‘The impact of the regicide of Charles I on contemporary English notions of time and the future’ at the University of Cambridge, I examined the execution of King Charles I in 1649 as a moment of ideational change and adaptation. Taking a diachronic approach to periodicals like almanacs and newsbooks, I traced how ideas of time and the future evolved in response to unexpected political change. My research is published in Historical Research (2021, open access) and the dissertation is available on the Cambridge repository. My PhD was supervised by Dr David Smith.

Geographies of knowledge in diplomacy: My MSc research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies examined diplomatic records to analyse geopolitical imaginations of Antarctica and Outer Space, and how they translated into the international treaties that govern these spaces today.

Historical GIS: I work mainly with historical geographical information systems (GIS), georeferencing and performing data capture on historic maps to create a digital interactive ‘kinetic map’. This sequential, dynamic and interactive animation will reveals how the treaty process drove the transformation of the Northeast American political and intercultural landscape over 230 years.

Machine learning maps: I lead a collaborative project with the Alan Turing Institute to explore how we can use machine learning to automatically recognise text on pre-20th century colonial maps. By comparing these map annotations, we will build a ‘genealogy’ of maps to help recover and quantify Indigenous contributions to European cartographic knowledge.

Crowd-sourced research: I am co-lead on Mapscapes, a people-powered research project that invites volunteers to recover the Indigenous cultural geography of the American Northeast. Using a range of historic sources, volunteers find, locate, and position the names the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations used to denote the villages, towns, and significant places within their homelands. I am part of a project to extract data on rainfall trends in Southeast Asia from historical ships’ logbooks.

Indigenous environmental research: I am Associate Editor of Cambridge Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research. It offers state-of-the-art interdisciplinary analyses within the rapidly growing area of Indigenous environmental research, and is aimed at researchers, policy-makers and NGOs. The series investigates how environmental issues and processes relate to Indigenous socio-economic, cultural and political dynamics. We invite submissions on topics like traditional ecological knowledge, resource management, food systems, and more. More details on the Series page.

Sustainability in orbital space: I am currently exploring discourses of sustainability in orbital space, particularly around our memory of space debris incidents including the 1978 de-orbiting of Kosmos 954 and the introduction of Hydrazine into Baffin Bay by European space launches in the 2010s.