Away from the Water

Historical geography; history of science and technology; environmental history; histories of weather and climate; nineteenth century

In 2022 I have held a Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Fellowship to investigate the historical geographies of meteorological observatories in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire. This has most recently involved conducting archival research into the history of rainfall study in Britain from the 1850s to the 1910s. The main output of this project will be a research monograph, to be published by Cambridge University Press, titled Atmospheric Empires: Observatory Meteorology in Victorian Britain. Another ongoing project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and examines the history and heritage of extreme weather in Scotland since the late nineteenth century. The project team are working with the Museum and Archives of the Outer Hebrides to produce a short film about our use of school logbooks to track the effects of extreme weather on the lives and livelihoods of the islanders. We recently published an article on our research in the Journal of Historical Geography, entitled 'Extreme Weather, school logbooks and social vulnerability: The Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. Previous research projects of mine have examined the historical geographies of geophysics in the polar regions during the Cold War; the histories and heritage of environmental and climate change; and regional scientific cultures in the nineteenth century.