Tim Causer's research interests include the life and thought of Jeremy Bentham, and the histories of convict transportation, crime and punishment, and colonial Australia. He is co-editor, with Professor Philip Schofield, of Panopticon versus New South Wales and Other Writings on Australia, a forthcoming volume of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. In addition to hitherto unpublished material which sheds light on debates around colonialism, the punishment of criminals, the operation of government, and Bentham's unsuccessful panopticon penitentiary scheme, the volume contains Bentham's hugely influential critique of criminal transportation to New South Wales.

His current research projects include, with Professor Schofield and Professor Margot Finn (UCL History), a collection of essays exploring Bentham's writings on Australia, and with Professor Schofield and Dr Chris Riley, editing the final two volumes of Bentham's Correspondence. Tim is also preparing an edition of Bentham's Auto-Icon Writings, which will include Bentham's several wills, as well as the unpublished 'Auto-Icon; or, the Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living', Bentham's treatise on the utility of human remains. 

Tim is the author of Memorandoms by James Martin, an edition of the earliest Australian convict narrative, the original manuscript of which is in the Bentham Papers at UCL. The Memorandoms is the only first-hand account of perhaps the most famous escape from Australia by transported convicts, that led by Mary and William Bryant in March 1791.