I am a historian of modern British society and culture with a focus on the home, the family and the material and visual world. I studied History at Mansfield College Oxford before taking the MA in Women's and Gender History at Royal Holloway. This led to a PhD at RHUL exploring the material culture of the Victorian middle-class home. After that, I worked at the universities of Oxford, Manchester and Surrey before returning to Royal Holloway in 2008.

Since then, I’ve taught lots of students, written and edited six books and led two major RCUK-funded research projects on the material world of nineteenth-century institutions and pets in British family life. At RHUL I co-direct the Bodies and Material Culture Research Group. I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. I co-edit the The Journal of Victorian Culture.

Taking history outside the academy has been an important part of my work – in 2008 I co-curated ‘Choosing the Chintz’ with the Museum of the Home in Hoxton. In 2014 I worked with the museum again to curate ‘Homes of the Homeless: Seeking Shelter in Victorian London’, based on my institutions project. The exhibition explored Victorian London from the point of view of the very poor and homeless – bringing to life the spaces and places that they encountered, using material objects to recreate their experiences. Visitors were able to try out a ‘coffin bed’ from a Victorian homeless shelter, and to pick oakum – a task that confronted inmates of workhouses and casual wards.  

Since then I’ve worked with local history organisations and heritage providers – and have collaborated with Surrey History Centre, Hampshire Local Archives, Wandsworth Libraries and Blue Cross. In 2021 I led an AHRC Follow on Funding Project to co-curate Pet Life an immersive exhibition for families at Museum of Home and to create the film Pets: Love, Loss and Healing with Blue Cross and Belle Vue Productions.

I am a historian of modern British society and culture with a focus on the home, the family and the material and visual world. I am also interested in histories of disabilities, mental health, education and animals. I have written books about the middle-class home in the nineteenth century, the material worlds of Victorian institutions and the rise of pet keeping. 

My first book Material Relations: Families and Domestic Interiors in England 1850-1910, looked at how the material set up of the Victorian home shaped family relationships and social identities.  The book explored marriage, parenting, masters and servants and the experiences of children as well as home decoration and domestic rituals and routines. Women and domestic life remain one of my core research interests and I have also co-edited special issues on Home and Work and Victorian Women, and most recently the book Gender and Material Culture in Britain from 1660.   

After that I wanted to find out about what happened to ideas of domesticity beyond the home – so I started to investigate the material worlds of residential institutions – where tens of thousands of people lived in the Victorian period.  From 2010-13, I led the ESRC-funded At Home in the Institution Project, examining daily material life in asylums, schools and lodging houses. This was the basis of my second book, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England. 

More recently I’ve researched the role of animals in British families – and the history of pets in the home. From 2016 to 2019 I led the first major archival survey of the role of pets in British family life, funded by the AHRC.  With Professor Julie-Marie Strange, I wrote the book Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life which was published in 2023. Our book tells the story of the powerful emotional investment of British people in their pets –and how human-pet relationships have altered over time.

I have written sixteen articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics including Victorian drawing rooms, clothing in lunatic asylums and Siamese cats.

I’m currently working on a new project on the history of family papers. The project explores how and why families documented their lives in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the intersection of materiality, emotion and identity in family archiving practices.

I teach on a range of undergraduate courses in Modern British History.

I have run the following specialist courses:

• HS3363 Photography and Film and British Society, 1850-1960
• HS2234 Modern Girls: Women in Twentieth-Century Britain
• HS2302 Grand Designs: the Victorians and their Material Worlds

I also co-teach two specialist MA Courses - HS5647 Looking at the Victorians: Visual and Material Culture in Britain, 1837-1901 and HS5322 The Material Culture of Homelife: European Households, 1400-1850.

I currently supervise five PhD students and am happy to hear from students who would like to pursue doctoral studies. My key areas for PHD supervision are: material and visual culture; gender, family and relationships; domesticity and home life; disability and mental health; education; environment and animals.