I am a Research Associate on the DFG- and AHRC-funded project 'Take Me and Make It Happen! How-to Books from the Ferguson Collection Glasgow, and Corresponding Holdings at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel'.

Before coming to Glasgow in January 2025, I was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Universal Short Title Catalogue, an open-access bibliography of early modern print based at the University of St Andrews. I completed my PhD on 'Meanings and uses of numeracy in Scotland and northern England, c.1660–c.1800' at St Andrews in 2024, funded by a Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership, and also held a short-term fellowship at the Huntington Library, California in 2023.

In 2023, my article on ‘Recordkeeping and the Business of Books in pre-Union Edinburgh: The Debt Book of John Porteous, 1699–1702’ was awarded the Scottish Records Association's Tunnock History Prize.

I am co-editor of the history of knowledge blog, Scilicet

My research interests lie in the social, cultural and economic history of early modern Britain, and especially the histories of numeracy, knowledge, communication and the book. My doctoral research focussed on the social history of numeracy in Scotland and northern England, c.1660–c.1800, examining the ways in which people at all social levels used number skills in daily life, and how the evolution of numeracy was bound to broader social and economic change. I am continuing this research with a project on 'Numeracy, accounting and debt litigation in eighteenth-century Scotland', funded by an Economic History Society Carnevali Research Grant.

As a Research Associate on the DFG- and AHRC-funded project 'Take Me and Make It Happen! How-to Books from the Ferguson Collection Glasgow, and Corresponding Holdings at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel', I am researching the nature and popularity of early modern instructional and didactic literature. I am particuarly interested in the intersections between knowledge, popular culture and cheap print, themes which are explored in my 2022 article on 'Numeracy and Popular Culture: Cocker’s Arithmetick and the Market for Cheap Arithmetical Books, 1678–1787'.

Research groups

• Early Modern History

Prior publications