Research

My thesis, 'The Right-Wing Press and the British World, 1780-1830' is supervised by Professor David Lambert (University of Warwick) and Professor Gordon Pentland (Monash University, Australia) and funded through the Monash/Warwick Joint Alliance scholarship. My thesis is focussing on two distinct but overlapping strands: the "right-wing" newspaper press domestically, and the colonial "right-wing" press and the flows of information between them.

The research focusses firstly on the under-utilised "right-wing" corpus of domestic newspapers. It investigates how we define the "right-wing" in Britain in this period from the multiple distinct political groupings and geographical differences and how that then translates into the conservative newspapers published at that time. From there it investigates the social and political impact of the press in an important time in British politics with the Age of Reform. It also analyses how conservative elements of the press and politics respond to and makes use of Jacobinism and radicalism through debates on political reform, Catholic enfranchisement, abolition of slavery and freedom of the press.

The research the pivots to the under-researched conservative colonial presses and how they work into imperial networks across the British Empire (whether that be individuals or newspapers themselves). Analysing the flows of information from the conservative colonial press in this period allows us to get a better idea of the developing imperial mindset in Britain itself and how that also influences those domestic debates mentioned above.