I was born in Shelburne, Vermont. Some of my earliest childhood memories are visiting the Shelburne Museum to run along the decks of the last steamship to navigate Lake Champlain – the Ticonderoga. I attended Gettysburg College in the hopes of studying the American Civil War only to realise that people who studied the Civil War took things a little too seriously for me – including dressing up and reenacting on a weekly basis. Eventually, I landed on double majoring in political science and history. By chance I decided to study abroad in Bath, England and took a course on Irish Nationalism taught by the son of a mixed-marriage Ulsterman. That course would radically change my life as I became increasingly interested in the complexity and political urgency of Ireland's history. 

I spent a year at Queen's University Belfast working on an MA in Irish Studies – a deeply formative period where this island's past further enveloped me into its webs of paradox and contradiction. After taking two years to work as a community organiser in Burlington Vermont, I entered graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University to work toward my PhD under the supervision of David W. Miller. My dissertation began as a project interested in exploring the characteristics of agrarian violence in pre-Famine Ireland and slowly evolved into a story about the relationship between violence and British state policy immediately preceding the Famine. The dissertation earned the Adele Dalsimer Prize for Distinguished Dissertation from the American Conference of Irish Studies (2015) and my teaching earned the Michael J. Goldman Award for Teaching Excellence, an annual prize awarded to the best graduate student teaching from the History Department at CMU. I find time in the classroom the most rewarding part of my job, and it sustains me during the solitary aspects of research and writing.

My family and I moved to Cork in August 2018. I enjoy the outdoors, especially hiking, opportunities to travel, and the occasional concert.

My own experiences have animated some of the most compelling aspects of the historian's craft – the ways in which contingency, human agency, and large structural forces intersect to make our own complex microcosms, as well as the wider worlds that we inhabit.

My first monograph Outrage in the Age of Reform: Irish Agrarian Violence, Imperial Insecurity, and British Governing Policy, 1830-1845 was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2022. The paperback was published in May 2024. It is a re-examination of the so-called 'decade of reform' that demonstrates how Ireland – especially Irish agrarian violence – shaped British political culture in previously unappreciated ways. 

My next project will explore the relationship between the British Empire and the constituent Queen's Colleges c. 1845-1921. 

I have a forthcoming article with English Historical Review that explores the relationship between Irish nationalism in the Age of O'Connell and its relationship to global humanitarian efforts, such as anti-slavery, and British imperial entanglements in the 1830s and 1840s. 

I am co-editor with Dr Heather Laird (UCC, School of English) of the recently published Dwellings in Nineteenth-Century, an edited collection arising from the Society for Nineteenth Century Ireland's 2021 conference held at UCC.

I teach modules on aspects of Irish and British history during the long nineteenth century across all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including courses on Ireland and Empire, the Great Famine, the British Empire, Historiography, and a dissertation seminar on the relationship between land and nationalism. 

I am the module organiser or co-organiser for: 

• HI 1015 - The Craft of History
• HI 2049 - The Great Famine - its Making, Meaning, and Memory
• HI 3077 - Ireland and Empire in the 19th-century
• HI 3200 - Dissertation Seminar - Land and Nationalism in 19th-century Ireland
• HI 6076 - Changing Directions in History: Transformative Historians and Their Work

I am currently co-supervisor of one PhD student, and one MPhil student. 

I welcome prospective PhD enquiries on topics related to 19th-c. Ireland, Britain, and Empire; political history; history of political thought and Ireland.