Academic Profile

• Summer 2012: Mayers Fellow, The Huntington Library
• 2011-2013: Assistant Professor of Global History, Warwick University
• 2010-2011: Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational History, Oxford University
• 2007-2010: PhD History, King's College London
• 2005-2006: MSt Archaeology, Oxford University
• 2001-2005: BA History, Harvard University

 
Teaching

 
Undergraduate Modules taught:

• HI268 Politics and Society in Africa from 1800
• HI31W Africa and America since 1776

• AM103 Comparative History and Literatures of the Americas

• HI153 Making the Modern World
• HI323 Historiography

MA Modules taught:

• HI950 Tensions of Empire
• HI965 Global History: Themes, Issues, and Approaches

Research

I am interested in the history of humanitarian movements and their connections to European and American imperial expansion in Africa from the eighteenth century. My research projects to date have looked at:

1. the development of society in Sierra Leone and Liberia and the colonies' influence on the American and British anti-slavery movements in the antebellum period
2. the participation of African Americans in the settler migrations of the nineteenth century
3. the 'Image of Africa' problem with regard to the perception of 'legitimate' agricultural progress in Sierra Leone and Liberia
4. the role of the Sierra Leone diaspora in promoting British imperial expansion in West Africa
5. 'Ethical consumption' movements and 'legitimate commerce' in West Africa, 1760-1840
    

Select Publications

"British West Africa or ‘The United States of Africa’? Imperial pressures on the transatlantic anti-slavery movement, 1839–1842," Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 9:2 (2011).

"'Destiny seems to point me to that country': Early Nineteenth Century African American migration, emigration, and expansion," Journal of Global History, 7:1 (2012).

"Bridgeheads of Empire? Liberated African Missionaries in West Africa," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Co-edited special issue, 40:5 (2012).

Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia, (Cambridge Series in Imperial and Post-colonial Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, December 2012).

The History and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention and Aid in Africa, (Forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).