I joined Westminster in 2020 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, following an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge's Bennett Institute for Public Policy and completing my PhD at Queen Mary University of London. My research is primarily in post-1945 UK international history and as well as wider contemporary history. Over the past few years I have published research on the UK's relationship with the European Community, the 1975 referendum, Enoch Powell's conception of sovereignty and contingency planning for Brexit. I'm currently writing a history of the first generation of British officials and politicians that went to Brussels to work in the institutions of the European Community.
My current project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is an in-depth examination of the British officials and politicians working in the institutions of the European Community, in the period from the UK’s entry to the EC in January 1973 until the signing of the Single European Act (SEA) in February 1986. It is based on archives and interviews.
I recently published my first book:The First Referendum: Reassessing Britain’s Entry to Europe, 1973–75 - https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145192/. It explores the UK’s early experiences of EC membership under the government of Edward Heath, the renegotiation conducted by Harold Wilson’s government, and the 1975 referendum which ultimately confirmed the UK’s membership of the EC by a majority of 67 per cent.
My other recent publications include:
''No' Vote Contingency Planning for the UK’s 1975 Referendum', Journal of European Integration History 26:1 (2020): pp. 107–126. Available: https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0947-9511-2020-1-107/no-vote-contingency-planning-for-the-uk-s-1975-referendum-volume-26-2020-issue-1
Together with Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, ''The Empire of England': Enoch Powell, Sovereignty and the Constitution of the Nation', Twentieth Century British History (2020). Available: https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/tcbh/hwaa022/5864477
'Government Policy and Propaganda in the 1975 Referendum on European Community Membership’, Contemporary British History 34:1 (2019): pp. 1–21. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2019.1588115
Contingency Planning: The 1975 and 2016 Referendums, Bennett Institute Research Report, jointly published with UK in a Changing Europe, March 2019. Available: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications/contingency-planning-1975-and-2016-referendums/
'Macmillan, Nkrumah and the 1961 Application for European Economic Community Membership’, The International History Review 39:4 (2017): pp. 575–591. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2016.1245675