I am a historian of colonialism, medicine and public health, with a specialist focus on the British Empire in South Asia.

My research expertise lies in the histories of public health, medicine, urbanism, and race in the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Natural and built environments, specifically the Indian Ocean, Britain’s India-bound ships, and Indian and British port towns were central to my DPhil research ( which was funded by the Wellcome Trust project 'From Sail to Steam: Health, Medicine, and the Victorian Navy', at the University of Oxford ) as sites for the exercise of imperial power, medical knowledge, and the racialised body. It examined the co-emergence of tropical and maritime hygiene in the context of an environmentalist reconceptualisation of the tropics in the long nineteenth century. I integrated imperial history with a human geography approach in examining the medical discourses of white British seamen’s illness in the tropical ‘disease environment’ – in transit in a liminal space such as on board ships in the Indian Ocean and in Indian port cities. The primary outcome of this research will be my first monograph, Health and Welfare of European Seamen in Nineteenth-Century India.

I am currently a Research Associate on the AHRC project 'Mariners: Religion, Race and Empire in British Ports, 1801-1914'. I study the significance of Christian missions for the welfare of white British seamen in London, Liverpool, Bristol, and Hull. 

Prior to joining Bristol, I was a Research Associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Invisible Crises, Neglected Histories c.1900-present: Malaria in Asia’ project. I teamed up with historians, anthropologists, epidemiologists, and biologists to examine the ecology of malaria and India’s epidemiological transformation under colonial rule.