Biography
I am a historian of seventeenth and eighteenth-century British architecture in its intellectual and global contexts. Before joining Cambridge, I was a Lecturer in Architectural History at Queen Mary University of London from 2018 to 2025. Prior to that, I taught in the architecture school of the University of New Mexico, and in the art history department of Oxford University. I also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford. I have a BA from Oxford and an MA and PhD from the University of York.
My research concerns intellectual engagement with architectural design and practice in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain. My first book, Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. I am currently working on two projects. The first is a book, entitled The Greek Revival. A Prehistory. It concerns British and French engagement with ancient Greek and Eastern Mediterranean architecture in the long seventeenth century. It will show that Western European understanding of Greek architecture was more sophisticated and widespread in the period than has previously been thought. The second is an edition of the correspondence of Sir Christopher Wren. In the past, I have published on medical architecture in London in the late seventeenth century, on architecture’s role in the early Royal Society, and on the administration of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire.
Publications
Books
Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England, Oxford University Press, 2017.
The Greek Revival. A Prehistory. Forthcoming.
The Letters of Sir Christopher Wren. Forthcoming.
Edited Volumes.
The Afterlife of Sir Christopher Wren, Routledge. Forthcoming.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, Lord Burlington, the Many Caprices of the World’, Architectural History, 2025.
‘Christopher Wren. A Life in Letters’, The Georgian Group Journal, 2025.
‘Public Servant: The Life of Sir Christopher Wren’, Apollo, February 2023.
‘Writing About Romano-British Architecture in the Seventeenth Century’, in The Quest for an Appropriate Past: Literature, Architecture, Art and the Creation of National Identities in Early Modern Europe (c.1400–1700), edited by Konrad Ottenheym, Brill, 2018.
‘Science and Architecture in the Age of Enlightenment’ in volume two of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Architectural Theory and Practice, Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, edited by Caroline van Eck (general editor Harry Mallgrave), 2017.
‘Architecture, Anatomy and the New Science in Early Modern London: Robert Hooke’s College of Physicians’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, December 2013.
‘Francis Vernon, the Early Royal Society and the First English Encounter with Ancient Greek Architecture’, Architectural History, August 2013.
‘Architecture, Improvement and the “New Science” in Early Modern Scotland’, Architectural Heritage, the Journal of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, 2012.
‘The Limits of Collaboration: Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and the Designing of the Monument to the Great Fire of London’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, June 2011.
‘”Stonekiller” Antiquarian Activism in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, forthcoming Burlington Magazine.
‘Print, Peril, and Precarity: Antiquarian Images of Ancient Greek Architecture in the Seventeenth-Century’, in Creativity and Invention in Antiquarian Drawings, ed. Cammy Brothers and Kathleen Christian, Forthcoming Harvey Miller Press, All'Antica.
From 2012-2020 I was deputy editor of the international peer-revied journal Architectural History.
