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My work lies primarily in the political, social, and spatial history of nineteenth-century North America, though I also have comparative interests in late twentieth-century urban industrial society. With Dan Scroop (Glasgow), I have edited a volume on transatlantic history, and much of my research now seeks to situate the United States in a wider world.

My first book, In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in Age of Urban Consolidation, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. Beginning amid social and sectional crisis in the 1840s, and ending in the strikes and economic stagnation of the 1870s, the volume explores how a generation of Americans navigated years of civil wars, which extended from northern fields to southern streets. Intoxicated by the growth of their city and nation, but terrified by the prospect of each falling apart, they searched for methods to bind unstable societies together. 'In Union There Is Strength' became a rallying cry not just for patriots concerned about the dissolution of the United States, but also urban residents who came to see their city as a miniature of the nation at large. Moving from the streets of Philadelphia to Parisian boulevards, European socialist experiments, and attempts to democratize American capitalism, the book shows how the path to modernizing the second biggest metropolis in the mid-nineteenth-century United States included some surprising waystations.

My next project, Let the Empire Come: Monarchy, Modernity, and Conspiracy in Reconstruction Era America builds outwards from a short-lived but wildly-popular newspaper from post-Civil War New York that proposed replacing the republic with a polity somewhere between the constitutional monarchy of Victorian Britain and the highly-centralised state of Bonapartist France. I am using this weekly journal as a lens onto debates about the relationship of democracy, authoritarianism, and modernity in an age in which 'modern kingship', as one writer put it, seemed to offer a firmer foundation for national consolidation than popular sovereignty. My research here considers the dissenting Americans who wondered whether a crowned head – and not the republic – lay at the 'end of history'. The first article from this research appeared in Civil War History in June 2014, and I am currently turning the research into a book that explores monarchy as one of the less likely 'Atlantic Crossings' in an era of liberal reform.

I am an associate editor at the , and will be editing the volume Philadelphia and the World, due to appear in 2026 with the University of Pennsylvania Press.