My research focuses on the political and intellectual history of the modern United States, with intersecting interests in the history of political thought. My award-winning first book, Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, 2025), provides a new historical account of a leading political writer who shaped the development of American liberalism and democratic theory across the twentieth century. I have also published articles on urban politics, media history, the history of jazz, and other topics.
My current book project concerns Watergate, and is tentatively titled Visions of Watergate: Democracy and Legitimacy in the American State. By exploring a range of contemporary debates about what the crisis meant for the American state, and by moving beyond insider narratives about who knew what and when, this project aims to rethink Watergate’s significance as a legitimacy crisis for American democracy. A pilot article from this research is forthcoming in the Historical Journal.
At the RAI I work with colleagues at the University of Missouri to deliver the Kinder Institute’s MA in Atlantic History and Politics. Before joining Oxford, I taught US history and the history of political thought at King’s College London. I completed my BA, MPhil, and PhD at the University of Cambridge, where I was also a Junior Research Fellow. My research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Library of Congress, the University of Chicago Library, and the Newberry Library. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Books:
Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025). [Winner of the 2025 History Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication]
Visions of Watergate: Democracy and Legitimacy in the American State (book project in development)
Articles and Chapters:
“Mary McCarthy and the Watergate Crisis,” Historical Journal (accepted and forthcoming).
“The American Berserk as Pedagogic Challenge,” in Teaching American Studies in Britain: Perspectives and Possibilities, eds. Megan Hunt and Lydia Plath (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 49–55.
“Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion,” American Journalism 40, no. 1 (2023): 51–79. [Winner of the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize, Society for US Intellectual History]
“Journalism and Corruption in Chicago, 1912–1931,” Historical Journal 65, no. 5 (2022): 1374–96.
“Rethinking the Scopes Trial: Cultural Conflict, Media Spectacle, and Circus Politics,” Journal of American Studies 56, no. 1 (2022): 142–66.
“Democracy and Expertise in the Lippmann-Terman Controversy,” Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 2 (2019): 561–92.
“Dr. Billy Taylor, ‘America’s Classical Music,’ and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador,” Journal of American Studies 51, No. 1 (2017): 117–39.
Reviews and Review Essays:
Review of At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-twentieth Century by Casey Nelson Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick, American Political Thought 10, no. 1 (2021): 158–60.
“New Histories of American Newspapers,” Historical Journal 63, no. 5 (2020): 1390–1400.
“Democratic Dilemmas of the Cold War,” Global Intellectual History 5, no. 4 (2020): 390–95.
I’ve also written reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Dissent.
