I received my PhD in history from the University of Toronto in 2006 and my MA from Queen’s University in 2001. Prior to joining Laurier, I was an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi from 2007-2011.

The main focus of my research is on representations of men’s mental illness in Victorian culture. This project entails a multi-textual approach, including medical registers, fiction, autobiographies and popular media. Ideas about mental illness were as much a creation of popular culture as medical research, and my work explores those connections. I am currently working on a monograph entitled Madmen in the Attic.

I am also pursuing a SSHRC-funded digital humanities project on contrasting views of Jack the Ripper’s London. This heart of the project is entitled "Mapping Ripper's Whitechapel," an open-access website tracing popular representations of crime, poverty, and sexuality from 1885-1895.

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant "Ripper's Whitechapel: The Digital Humanities and Perceptions of Space in late Victorian England," (2015-2017)
• Faculty of Arts Travel Grant (2015)
• Undergraduate Research Assistantship (2014)
• Laurier Research Seed Grant (2013, 2012)
• Faculty of Arts Merit Award (2012)

I am happy to supervise graduate students in the areas of Victorian gender history, cultural history, and the history of sexuality and psychiatry in Britain and its empire.

• "Shattered Minds: Madmen on the Railways, 1860-1880," Journal of Victorian Culture 21:1 (2016): 21-39.
• "Queensberry’s Misrule: Reputation, Publicity, and the Idea of the Victorian Gentleman,” Canadian Journal of History 48:2 (2013): 277-306.
• London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, New York: 2011.
• “Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity, and the Importance of Oral Communities in late Nineteenth-Century London,” Gender and History 21:1 (2009): 86-106.
• “A Flight to Domesticity?: Making a Home in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 1880- 1914,” Journal of British Studies 45:4 (2006): 796-818.