School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Whites Writing Whiteness: Letters, Domestic Figurations and Representations of Whiteness in South Africa from the 1770s to the 1970s project, a 4-year ESRC Professorial Fellowship awarded to Professor Liz Stanley. My role includes creating databases for the Forbes Diary collection (1850-1917), managing the WWW project website, and co-convening the 'Lives & Letters' mailing list (formerly the NABS mailing list).

I have also recently completed my PhD in Sociology, supervised by Liz Stanley and Donald MacKenzie. My doctoral research concerned the long-term development of the British funeral industry in terms of the histories of particular family-owned funeral firms. It is also closely engaged with the work of Norbert Elias, and his concepts of figuration and sociogenesis in particular, which provides a direct link with my WWW work.

Registration

I was awarded my PhD in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh in July, 2017. I presently hold an SPS Honorary Fellowship, which was awarded to me in the summer of 2017 and continues on through to the latter part of 2020.

Qualifications

PhD Sociology | University of Edinburgh

MA Social Anthropology | Goldsmiths - University of London

MSc Sociology (Research) | the LSE 

BSc Sociology | Northeastern University

Recent Publications

(2019) A Methodological Approach to Theory-as-Data: Tracing the Development of Norbert Elias’s Theory of Established–Outsiders Relations. In SAGE Research Methods Datasets. SAGE Publications Ltd.

(2018) Thinking with Elias using the Collected Works Human Figurations, 7(1): http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0007.109.

(2018, in press, with Liz Stanley) Documents of Life: In Theory and Practice. In (eds) Paul A. Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Melissa A. Hardy and Malcolm Williams. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Methods. London: Sage.