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Biography
I am a cultural historian of Russia and France in the early twentieth century, with a focus on women and gender. More broadly, my research interests encompass urban history, intimacy, histories of sexuality and the body, music, and dance.
I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2021, under the supervision of Associate Professors Julia Mannherz and Christina de Bellaigue. My doctoral thesis - Feminine Feelings: Women and Sensation in Paris and St Petersburg, 1900-1913 - argued that gender was a pivotal factor in shaping women's everyday sensory encounters with the built environment of the modern city. In working to elaborate and unpick the reciprocal relationship between gender and sensation, this research demonstrated how femininity was constructed as embodied practice at a moment of significant social, cultural, and technological change.
In 2022, I returned to the University of Auckland | Waipapa Taumata Rau - where I earned my BA/BMus, BA(Hons) and MA degrees - as a Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Research Fellow. As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Nottingham, I will be working on a new project, provisionally titled 'Behind Closed Doors: Women's Intimacy in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union'. In this research, I hope to trace how female intimacy was forged, expressed, fractured, and remade amidst the violent social and political upheavals of the revolutionary period, 1900-1930.
Recent Publications