Biography

I am a second year PhD student at the University of Manchester, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC NWCDTP).

My PhD is titled ‘Global Biopiracy in the Age of Empire: Indigeneity, Decolonisation, and the Politics of Botanical Knowledge in the British World, c.1600-1800’. Its methodology combines Critical Indigenous Studies, the History of Science in a Global Perspective, the Environmental Humanities and Decolonial Museum Studies to demonstrate how British imperial protagonists stole and exploited botanical knowledge and materials from Indigenous Peoples during the early modern period. My thesis is supervised by Professor Stefan Hanß, Dr Rachel Winchcombe, and Dr Alex Alberda.

I aim to promote Indigenous agency in my PhD. I am also working closely with archival and heritage collections across the world. Thanks to funding from the AHRC NWCDTP, I have conducted a fieldwork trip in London and another in Australia and New Zealand. 

I studied Master of Arts in Heritage Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Modern History with Economics at the University of Manchester. I was awarded the Faculty of Humanities Dean’s Award for Achievement, the Thomas Frederick and Mary Tout prize for performance in exams, and the Manchester Alumni Scholarship in recognition of the completion of my undergraduate degree to an exceptional standard.

An article about my undergraduate dissertation - ‘An Empire of Botanists: Science and Colonialism in the Eighteenth-century British World’ - was published in the Sir Joseph Banks Society’s magazine.

Between May 2022 and January 2023 I was employed as a research assistant at the University of Manchester. This position involved researching the British Council and creative hubs in SouthEast Asia with a focus on sustainable development. I also helped to organise and conduct the online ‘Symposium on Network-building in Cultural Diplomacy’.

Research Interests 

I am predominantly interested in researching the history of science, specifically botany, and the decolonisation of heritage spaces and records through foregrounding Indigenous perspectives. My research interests are represented in the methodology of my thesis. Critical Indigenous Studies focuses on promoting the complexity of Indigenous Peoples and their role as historical actors. Employing the Environmental Humanities allows my thesis to explore the relationships between imperial agents, Indigenous Peoples and the plants and environments that they are entwined with. The History of Science in a Global Perspective allows me to explore the entanglement of British scientific practices with biopiracy in contexts around the world as well as the consequences of such activities for Indigenous Peoples. These research interests come together in my engagement in Decolonial Museum Studies; the study of biopiracy on a global scale can help to reverse colonial disavowal present in botanical archives and demonstrate that herbariums are sources of cultural and biological diversity.

These are the primary areas of interest for my thesis, however economic and military history are also important to my studies.

I am also interested in international relations. Whilst this facet of research does surface in my PhD project, for example when examining how international competition underlined biopiracy, it features most prominently in my MA where I examined the role of sport in soft power for my thesis.

Teaching

I am developing a portfolio of teaching experiences, currently as teaching assistant on the module ‘Forging a New World: Europe c.1450-1750’.