About
Archaeologist, historian, historical geographer, and historical sociologist researching the relationship between colonialism and settlement in pre-contemporary societies, ecclesiastic history and archaeology, as well as medievalism in popular culture and mythology building in settler colonial societies. Also researching the creation of usable pasts in the medieval period by annalists, genealogists and poets in Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and Iceland. Currently conducting the project 'A prosopography of migration in the long Insular Viking Age, c.AD790–1300' at the School of History at the University of St Andrews, as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. This project will create a prosopographical catalogue (an aggregate of inter-related biographies) and a monograph tracking the movement of the raiders, traders, and settlers from Scandinavia and from Scandinavian diasporic communities active in Britain and Ireland. The project will be innovative for using Insular, Continental, Scandinavian and Icelandic secular and ecclesiastical narrative, legal, textual, and administrative sources in tandem with material evidence, personal adornments, coins, and burial evidence. It will provide an important case study for historical studies of migration and colonialism, and on the formation and maintenance of identity, across space and time. Recently delivered the project 'Scandinavia's Insular Age' as a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow funded by the Irish Research Council at University College Dublin (2022–2024). The project treated the intensive social interaction between Scandinavia and Britain and Ireland in the period from the first viking raids in the eighth century and the retraction of Scandinavian kings from Insular politics in the fourteenth century, with a particular focus on the changes in Scandinavian society brought about by this. Formerly a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2022) on the Leverhulme-funded project "Mapping Lineages: Quantifying the Evolution of Maps of the British Isles" with Christopher Lloyd (PI) and Keith Lilley (Co-I). Former Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at Universität Heidelberg (2018–2020). Former co-editor of Human Figurations journal with Barbara Górnicka and Ryan Powell (2018–2021). Former editor of the Archaeological Review from Cambridge with Catalin Popa (2011–2012). Freelance academic copy-editor, typesetter and cartographer (2011–2022). My doctoral (awarded December 2020, University of Cambridge) and master's research investigated the links between historically attested colonial activity and settlement in Iron Age and medieval Ireland and northern Britain using archaeological, textual and toponymic evidence. Prior to that, my graduate sociological research was on seventeenth-century French Jansenism (University College Dublin), and my BA theses (University of Galway) were on Neolithic settlement in Ireland and the Jesuits in seventeenth century France.