I research and teach American and global history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the University of Iceland. I have a PhD in American history from the University of Cambridge (2019), where I received the Sara Norton Dissertation Prize.
My research focuses on the intersections of the histories of the state, capitalism and science, and has been published in leading venues, including the Journal of American History (2018), Journal of Global History (2026), Contemporary European History (2025) and the Journal of American History (forthcoming 2026).
My first monograph, The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government, will be published in May 2026 with the University of Chicago Press.
Before coming to the University of Iceland, I was Past and Present Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, the University of London, and Fennell Early Career Research Fellow in United States History at the University of Edinburgh
My research is guided by the central question of how power is constituted, conceptualized, and exercised within the early-/modern state. I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019 and previously studied at Vanderbilt University and the University of Oxford.
Focusing on American and global history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my interest lies in the interconnected histories of state formation, capitalism, and science as well as the history of political thought. My work combines close archival work—often uncovering overlooked figures and unused sources—with the reinterpretation of historical developments.
My first monograph is entitled The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government and will be published by The University of Chicago Press in May 2026. Scholars have told us a great deal about the fiscal-military system that set the stage for the modern state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book charts a second transformation that took place in the ages of Enlightenment and Revolutions.
See: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo263813201.html
My other research projects span a wide thematic range: emergency powers within the American state; the intellectual history of the American Revolution; military thought in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world; fin-de-siècle ideas of Anglo-Saxon empire; republicanism and Staatswissenschaften in Icelandic political thought; and the history of economic expertise and austerity after the First World War.