I started a fully-funded PhD at the University of Manchester in 2015, where my project examined the history of rioting in 19th century Britain. This history provides a useful corrective to the standard accounts of the evolution of the modern "social movement repertoire" and, as I have argued across a series of publications, draws attention to continuity in the repertoire of contention, regional variation and the uneven reach of the state. In 2018 I then joined UCL and shifted my research to focus on electoral politics, in particular the question of whether the experience of governing leads to deradicalisation and the myth of the "moderate middle". I have also always had an interest in criminology and have published a series of policy-oriented articles: one exploited exogenous variation in the rollout of Universal Credit in Britain to test whether restricted social security systems increase crime, and another used fixed-effect models to examine whether stop and search deters crime.

My research has been covered in The Times, The Guardian, The i, Apolitica, Bloomberg Radio, Channel 4 News and BBC News. I have been invited to present my work to think tanks, local government and APPGs. I also regularly work with and for political organisations, co-designing and co-writing reports on activism and social movements.