In June 2025, I co-organised a conference about the life and legacy of Lord Curzon (1859-1925), with Dr Oliver Godsmark (University of Derby) and Charlotte Johnson (University of Birmingham). Curzon was a British statesman best known for his tenure as Viceroy of India from 1899-1905, who has long been the subject of political biography, but has appeared in an increasingly wide range of studies, including research relating to gender, class, collecting histories, preservation and heritage, as well as colonial administration, politics and diplomacy. Marking the centenary of Curzon’s death, this conference brought together academic experts and heritage practitioners to reassess Curzon’s legacy, building on the momentum generated by the conferences The Taj of the Raj (Yale, 2023) and The Public Country House (V&A and National Trust, 2024), as well as the National Trust’s recent work on South Asian history at Curzon’s family seat, Kedleston Hall.

The conference programme generated discussion of a wide range of themes relating to Curzon’s legacy and its contemporary resonances. A visit to Kedleston Hall allowed participants to engage directly with the Museum, which displays over 1,000 objects from Asia amassed by Curzon. Building on these exchanges, we are now preparing a publication based on the proceedings of the conference and a follow-up research project. This conference was generously funded by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Association for Art History, and internal funding from the Creative and Cultural Industries theme at the University of Derby.

At the Pitt Rivers Museum, I was employed as a postdoctoral project researcher, funded by Volkswagen Stiftung. You can read more about this international project here.

In my role at Oxford, I worked with Professor Dan Hicks and conducted scoping research about monuments in London relating to colonial conflict, identifying statues, building names, street names, plaques and other memorials connected to British colonial expeditions and battles between c.1850-1914. As part of this project, I also created a database documenting individual colonial military events from this period, and created a working Google Map marking relevant monuments. While accurately documenting these events is difficult, and gaining a complete picture is an impossible goal, working in this way gave me a new historical perspective. Having researched specific institutions, monuments, and collections in my previous work, researching such a broad set of events across a long period of time gave me a greater appreciation of the scale of colonial warfare and its memorialisation in the British capital.

In 2024, I worked on this collaborative project led by Dr Oliver Cox (Head of Academic Partnerships, V&A) and Dr Tarnya Cooper (Curatorial and Conservation Director, National Trust), and generously supported by a British Academy Innovation Fellowship Award.

I assisted with project management and the organisation of an online symposium and the sold-out Public Country House conference. These events showcased cutting-edge research and heritage practice, marking the 50th anniversary of the V&A’s famous Destruction of the Country House exhibition and exploring the past, present and future of country houses which are owned privately for the express purpose of public benefit.

Between 2019-2024 I completed my doctorate in Archaeology at the University of Oxford, in partnership with the National Trust. Generously funded by the AHRC, this collaborative doctoral award provided me with an opportunity to undertake a detailed study of the National Trust and its sites and collections.

I undertook extensive archival research to explore the history of the National Trust itself, examining how it has engaged with and presented Britain’s national and imperial history from the 1890s to the present day. As part of this work, I studied how heritage preservation developed internationally in the twentieth century, focusing on the National Trust’s collaborations with colleagues in the United States. I also considered the role of Lord Curzon, best-known for his time as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, as an early supporter of the National Trust who promoted historical preservation in Britain through the lens of colonial rule. My doctoral work also explored present-day concerns about how institutions reckon with colonialism and its legacies. My particular interest in this area is in understanding how organisations perpetuate historical ideas and practices, and the need to understand institutional history at the granular level in order to recognise where shared assumptions and norms emerge from over time.

Read more about my thesis here. You can also watch a paper I gave about my doctoral research at the University of Cambridge’s Heritage and Colonialism Discussion Group in 2024 on YouTube.

In 2021, I contributed to the University of Cambridge’s Legacies of Enslavement project, assisting the development of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘Black Atlantic: Power People, Resistance’ exhibition (2023-4) by delivering research on museum collections held by the university.

At the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, I catalogued and digitised a series of photographs from the Williamson Collection, associated with Frederick Williamson, a British Political Officer who was stationed in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet in the 1930s, and his wife, Margaret Williamson. Using Margaret’s memoir and the museum’s existing records, I researched the photographs, which documented the time that the couple spent in the region, identifying connections with objects from their collection.

At the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, I completed research into the John Watson Building Stones Collection, examining connections between the stone samples and monuments from India, South Africa, and the United States. Read more about my findings here.