Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Chair in Modern British Hiostory
- Dept of History
- Faculty of S&HS
I completed my PhD in Modern European (including British) History at Columbia University in New York in 1987 and then taught on the core Social Science curriculum for two years at the University of Chicago as a William Rainer Harper Fellow. Prior to taking up my appointment at UCL in July 2012, I held appointments in the History departments at Emory University (1989-2000) and Warwick University (2000-2012). In the latter institution I served as Head of Department, History (2006-2009), founding Director of the Institute of Advanced Study (2007-2009) and Pro Vice Chancellor (2011-2012). My professional responsibilities have included serving as editor, Journal of British Studies (July 1997-2001) and founding co-editor, Cambridge Social & Cultural Histories (2002-present); Council Member (2002-2005) and Vice President (2009-2012) of the Royal Historical Society; AHRC Peer Review College member (2004-2008); History Sub-panel Member, HEFCE REF (2011-2014); and Trustee, Victoria & Albert Museum (2012-present).


I am an historian of Britain and the British colonial world in the 'very long 19th century', c. 1750-1914. I have published monographs on British radicalism (After Chartism: Class & Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1884, Cambridge University Press, 1993) and on English consumer culture (The Character of Credit: Debt and Credit in English Culture, 1740-1914, Cambridge University Press, 2003), as well as a co-edited volume on bastards in 19th-century British culture (Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010). I am currently working on two projects related to the East India Company. The first is a monograph on the family (both British and Indian) in the making of British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent, c. 1757-1857. The second, working collaboratively with three other UCL historians and a host of researchers from beyond the History Department, is a Leverhulme Trust funded project on The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857. For more information on this second project, which explores the impact of Britain's empire in India on British material culture (particularly country houses), see our blog: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/ .