Writing, Research, Organisation

Writing & editing

I started my career as a freelance copywriter during my MA studies in 2014. Since then I’ve written and edited articles for academic journals and books, general audience magazines, and community history zines.

I now copyedit manuscripts for De Gruyter academic publishing, as well as The Italianist journal.

Currently I’m working towards my first academic monograph on the history of the Northern Star (1837-1852), the leading newspaper of the Chartist movement.

Research

Curran Index – Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (Spring 2025-) – I work as a research assistant, transcribing and cross-referencing the published journalism of Victorian feminist campaigner Frances Power Cobbe, using archival material to identify her anonymously written articles.

Brotherton Special Collections (Summer 2021) – I worked as part of a team of researchers to use corpus linguistics methodologies to search and identify offensive and problematic language in legacy catalogues in archival collections. We developed a workflow using open-source tools that anyone in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector can use for free.

East End Women’s Museum (Winter 2019/20) – I devised an analysis framework to process the audience consultation survey and creative workshop responses collected by EEWM community volunteers. I used mixed methodologies to analyse qualitative and quantitative data to determine potential audiences’ desires and access needs from an eventual bricks-and-mortar site of the museum, disseminated through a short report for the public and a more detailed report for stakeholders and funders.

Public engagement

I’ve appeared on BBC Sounds and BBC2 as an expert on Victorian working-class life.

Throughout my teaching career I used local museum, archive, and gallery collections to develop their ‘detective skills’ in historical analysis and engage hands-on with real local materials.

Events organisation

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Conference (Summer 2023) – I worked as part of an international team of academics to organise a three-day conference at the University of Caen, France. This included assessing applications for funding support from junior and precarious scholars to support their participation at the conference.

Throughout my career I’ve organised a number of academic conferences as well as regular seminar series. I use participant feedback to improve events.