Tim’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 (2022) for 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 In addition to hitherto unpublished material which sheds light on debates around colonialism, the punishment of criminals, the operation of government, and Bentham's unsuccessful panopticon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.

He is co-editor, with Professor Margot Finn and Professor Schofield, of Jeremy Bentham and Australia: Convicts, Utility, and Empire (2022),a collection of essays exploring Bentham’s writings on Australia, and the author of Memorandoms by James Martin (2017),an edition of the earliest Australian convict narrative, the original manuscript of which is in UCL’s Bentham Papers. 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.

Tim’s current projects include, with Professor Schofield and Dr Chris Riley, the preparation of the final two volumes of Bentham’s Correspondence, and of ‘Auto-Icon; or, the Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’, Bentham’s treatise on the utility of human remains.

Tim is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Menzies Australia Institute, King's College London.