RESEARCH INTERESTS

19th century Britain and its empire; 19th century Atlantic World; Chartism; 19th century United States; labor history; intellectual history; class formation and class consciousness; political economy; history of capitalism; print culture; Marxism; marxist humanism

AWARDS

Neubauer Fellowship

BIOGRAPHY

I see my work as continuing E.P. Thompson’s project of explaining the formation of the English and British working class and of its sense of class consciousness. However, I depart from Thompson and British social historians of a similar vein in that I attempt to situate the process of class formation in an imperial and international context. More than an attempt to participate in a general “international turn” in our discipline, I think that my study of the development of a universalist working-class consciousness within global capitalism inherently puts pressure on national boundaries. Studying how the British working class was “made” in a transnational context, then, is the only way to properly study its formation. 

I approached my first year paper on the Chartists — a working class movement for universal suffrage and other parliamentary reforms in the United Kingdom in the late 1830s and 1840s —with this orientation. Through the decentralized and interactive mechanisms of the main Chartist newspaper, The Northern Star, I argued that leaders of the movement actively attempted to construct a working-class consciousness along imperial and, later, more broadly internationalist lines. This shift resulted from an evolving (arguably, sharpening) conception of the working class of itself and its interests which was informed by the class struggles of the day and how the Northern Star interpreted them for its readership. 

Currently, I plan to move from this general study of Chartist internationalism to a project focused on the relationships and solidarities between the British working class during the Chartist years and recently emancipated people in the West Indies as well as, potentially, American labor radicals and abolitionists. I want to continue to study these solidarities in relation to print culture as well as to broad developments within global capitalism. 

I completed my B.A. in English literature and Economics at Swarthmore College in 2025. As an English student, I studied the racialization of the English working class in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and started an ongoing (although until very recently on hiatus) project on CLR James’s relationship with Victorian novels, most especially Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. I warmly invite anyone with overlapping interests or questions about my work to reach out via email.