Contact
Biography
My first degree was an LLB. in Law and European Studies (History and French) at the University of Limerick, which I completed in 2009. I subsequently studied for an MLitt in Reformation Studies at the University of St Andrews, and I enjoyed life on the eastern coast of Scotland so much that I stayed there for a PhD in Modern History, under the supervision of Guy Rowlands. My dissertation focused on an underappreciated aspect of international relations in the seventeenth centuries: namely the diplomatic and cultural interactions between the small states of northern Italy (the duchies of Parma, Modena, and Mantua-Monferrato) and the court of Louis XIV, king of France. I defended my PhD thesis in 2015, and spent a year as an assistant lecturer in the Department of History at my alma mater, Limerick, in 2015-16, before returning to St Andrews as an associate lecturer for two years, from 2016 to 2018.
I had a three-month fellowship at the British School at Rome in the autumn of 2018, and then returned to Limerick for a second spell as a lecturer in the spring of 2019. In the summer of that year I was appointed as a research associate on a project funded by the European Research Council, and based at the University of Oxford. This project, entitled "The European Fiscal-Military System, 1530-1870", investigates the ways in which early modern states resorted to private enterprise in order to fund the spiralling costs of warfare. The case-study for which I was responsible was that of the Republic of Geneva and the Swiss Confederacy. I was then appointed as a departmental lecturer for one year by the Faculty of History at Oxford, and as a temporary college lecturer at St Hugh's College. I joined the University of Nottingham as an assistant professor in September 2023.
Teaching Summary
I currently teach on the following modules:
HIST1002: Learning History
HIST1006: Themes in Early Modern European History
HIST3023: The British Civil Wars, c. 1639 - c. 1652
Year 3 students in 2024-25 will be able to take my spring semester Option module, HIST3127: Politics, Culture, and Sexuality in Renaissance and Baroque Rome.
I am also the Director of the Department of History's MA programme, and I welcome expressions of interest from potential applicants.