My research is guided by the central question of how power is constituted, conceptualized, and exercised within the early modern and 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.