About me

I have long worked to ensure that academic research speaks to issues of policy. While a graduate student at King's College London, I helped to establish the Historians in Residence Scheme, which brokered relationships between historians across the University of London and public institutions, such as the Cabinet Office and the Resolution Foundation. In my present role, I work with academics across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford helping them enhance their policy-relevant research.

My own academic research is at the intersection of history and political science. My PhD looked at the critics of Britain's attempts to be the Science and Tech Superpower of the post-war period. In doing so, it told a new story of Britain's changing political economy: rather than a ‘neo-liberalism’ from without, my work draws our attention to an economic liberalism from within. I suggested it was Whitehall, not Thatcherite ministers, who ensured a withdrawal from the spectacular industrial ambition that did so much to define British politics in the 1950s and 1960s. My first paper summarised this argument.

I have won several awards and fellowships for my research, including both the Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize and the Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. I have also written for the Guardian, the Independent, and Open Democracy and recently appeared on a Channel 4 documentary about Concorde.