Research Interests

• Britain and the world
• Comparative legal history
• Migration and immigration
• State formation
• History of crime and violence
• Global and transnational history

Current Projects

• Island Refuge: Exiles and Refugees in Britain from Constantine to Climate Change, an account of the long history of asylum in Britain, from the Romans to the present day.
• Plague in the City of Gold: Pestilence, Murder and the Twilight of the British Raj, which explores the history of the third plague pandemic in the British Empire and demonstrates how British plague policies helped to shape a more radical form of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Courses Taught

• Western Civilization to 1648
• Honors Western Civilization from 1648
• British Empire
• The Age of Exploration and Conquest
• The Age of Reason
• Capstone Research Seminar: Exploration and Empire
• Graduate Theory and Methods
• Graduate Seminar on European Imperialism

Awards and Honors

• Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, Finalist (2020)
• New York Times Editor’s Choice (2020)
• Financial Times Top 10 Books of the Year (2019)
• Hans Gatzke Prize, Yale University (2014)
• MacMillan Center Dissertation Research Grant (2011)
• Warnock Fellowship (2011)
• Miller Endowed Fellowship in History (2008-9)

• Island Refuge: Exiles and Refugees in Britain from Constantine to Climate Change (forthcoming, William Collins)
• To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (Yale University Press, 2019).
• The Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern English State (Yale University Press, 2017).
• “‘Love Ye Therefore the Strangers:’ Foreign Residents and the Criminal Law in Early Modern England, 1670-1750,” Continuity and Change 29 (Dec. 2014): 349-71.
• “From Treason to Homicide: Changing Conceptions of Petty Treason in Early Modern England,” The Journal of Legal History  34 (April 2013): 31-49.