Select Publications
Globalising Housework: Domestic Labour in London Homes, 1850-1914.
Based on my PhD Research, this book explores the international influences on cooking, cleaning, and childcare in the 19th and 20th century, in the homes of ordinary Londoners. It explores the role that technology and ideas about how people make and maintain their homes, and how race, class, politics, and empire are all evident in the most mundane every tasks.
Memory Bank: A Biography of Blythe House
(November 2023, Scala Arts & Heritage Publishing)
Working with Photographer Kevin Percival, I am compiling an architectural and cultural history of Blythe House, an Edwardian baroque building in West London. It opened in 1903 as the Post Office Savings Bank, and over the last four decades, it has been the home to the museum collections of the V&A, the British Museum, and the Science Museum, as well as featuring in countless films including The Father, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Danish Girl, and American Assassin.
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HOME (Second Edition)
ALISON BLUNT & ROBYN DOWLING
I contributed a research box to the second edition of HOME by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, a seminal text in the history and geography of home, looking at global influences in Victorian and Edwardian Homes.
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Technologies of Romance
SMG JOURNAL ISSUE 12
I co-edited a special edition of the Science Museum Group Journal with Dr Katy Barrett, exploring the intersection of art and science, and how each can inform the other. This was the result of a collaborative conference with Central Saint Martins, featuring a wide variety of art theory, histories of technology, and performance.
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Encounter and Exploitation: The English Colonization of North America, 1585-1615
TUDOR AND STUART SEAFARERS, Edited by James Davey
This chapter, a history of the earliest English voyages to North America, built on my contribution to the Tudor & Stuart Seafarers gallery at Royal Museums Greenwich. The gallery centres Indigenous American voices - and particularly those of the Mashpee Wampanoag - in the interpretation of England’s early relationship with America.
Exhibitions and Galleries
Swept Under the Carpet: Servants in London Households
At the Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum), I led on the 19th & 20th century exhibition of the impact of domestic workers in London homes, from 1830-1998. This included a series of interventions in period room sets. new interpretation and education resources, and arranging a number of loans from private lenders. The research behind this exhibition fed into the 2021 redevelopment of the permanent galleries at the museum.
SEA THINGS
I led on the research for the Sea Things gallery, a celebration of the weird and the wonderful of the maritime world. This gallery is full of mass displays of engaging objects, many on open-display, with interactive digital displays. The gallery was heavily collaborative, working closely with local communities, schools, and artists to connect people with their personal relationship to the sea through material culture.