I‘m a historian of political thought, with a range of interest stretching from the long nineteenth century to the present. My main area of study is the interrelation between capitalism and democracy, or the question of how capitalism — here understood as a system of generalised market dependence — both enables and constrains political thinking and acting.
After finishing my BA in Politics & Philosophy at the University of Essex in 2012, I took an MPhil in Cambridge in Political Thought and Intellectual History in 2015. My 2020 doctoral dissertation at Cambridge (‘Populism and the Democracy of Producers in the United States, 1877-1925’) focused on the political philosophy of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement.
Before my lectureship at University College, I was a Wiener-Anspach Fellow at the University of Cambridge and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven and Cornell.
Publications
Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income
The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
Selected Articles
“Populism and Republicanism”, Oxford Handbook of Republicanism (forthcoming 2023).
“Populism and the Historians: Richard Hofstadter and the Birth of a Global Populism Debate”, History of Political Thought (January 2023).
“Caesarism and Republicanism in the Political Thought of Thomas E. Watson”, American Political Thought (August 2021).
“Rebel Regions: Tom Hazeldine’s ‘The Northern Question’”, New Left Review (February 2021).
“State and Corporation in American Populist Political Philosophy, 1877-1902”, The Historical Journal (December 2020).
“The Antinomies of Ernesto Laclau”, Journal of Political Ideologies (June 2020), with Arthur Borriello.
“The Semantic Drift: Images of Populism in Post-war American Historiography and Their Relevance for (European) Political Science”, Constellations (September 2017).