I am a historian and expert in the digital humanities. My work combines archival research and computational methods to study the history of weather, information, law, and freedom of movement in early modern and modern Europe. My digital work develops new geospatial and data-driven methods to analyse – and question – data in historical and humanistic inquiry.

I am currently preparing a monograph on one of the most extensive projects of weather modification in European history, combining archival and digital evidence in an effort to develop the study of weather and climate in digital history. A first article on the subject has been published in Past & Present.

My first book is a history of free movement in the early modern German lands. Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020) charts the contentious ordering of movement in this dense political landscape through the lens of safe conduct, an institution that was common across the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating freedom of movement and its restriction in the Old Reich.

My academic articles and chapters deal with topics including historical data visualisation, digital spatial history, the application of distant reading approaches to intellectual history, and the justification of serfdom.

I have designed and taught numerous lecture and seminar classes for undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students on a range of topics in the digital humanities and history, including a university-wide course on critical data visualisation in which students from the sciences and humanities work on shared concerns.

I co-direct the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media at Manchester, where I developed new programmes in digital humanities and culture and co-organise the Environmental Digital Humanities seminar series. At Stanford, I co-directed the Digital Humanities Graduate Fellowship Program.

I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in History and Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. From 2016 to 2019, I held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University. I earned a PhD in History at the European University Institute in Florence, an MA in History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and the University of Heidelberg, as well as a BA in Economics at the latter university.

I have also taught at the Free University of Berlin and have been a visiting scholar at the University of Saint Andrews and at Columbia University.