About
I am a historian of society and environment in the modern world. My main interest is the encounter with nature in everyday contexts. My published work has made extensive use of oral histories, autobiographical, and life writing to explore popular encounters with the changing natural world. I am especially interested in ways that discrete events like storms, or oil spills suddenly bring environmental change into conscious focus as a site of social and economic conflict.
My historical work is rooted in the belief that there is a vast gulf between the natural world as it is seen and experienced ‘from-below’ – the everyday environment where concrete problems of social reproduction are fought out – and ruling-class ideologies of nature which find largely performative expression in highly formalised but ineffectual declarations of sustainable development. Publications
- ‘Fear of Falling? The Mineshaft as Chronic Emergency in Modern Cornwall’, in, S. De Vido, et al., (eds.), Gendering International Legal responses to Chronic Emergencies (forthcoming, 2026).
- with M. Turner, ‘That Awful Night in October’: Sensory Experiences of Britain’s 1987 Hurricane’, Cultural and Social History (2024) 21 (5), 721-739.
- ‘A Kind of Sensory, Strange Thing to Experience’: Speaking Environmental Disaster in the Sea Empress Project Archive’, Environment and History (2023) 29, 489-512.
- with A. Green, ‘Fragmentary Time: Memory and Politics in the Wake of the Torrey Canyon‘, in Cave M, Sloan S (Eds.) Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2022), 53-71.
- with A. Green, ‘The Torrey Canyon Disaster, Everyday Life, and the “Greening” of Britain’, Environmental History (2017) 22 (1), 101-126.
