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.

I recently completed a entitled Out of his Mind: Masculinity and mental illness in Victorian Britain. 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 previously completed a SSHRC-funded digital humanities project on contrasting views of Jack the Ripper’s London. This heart of the project is titled "Mapping Ripper's Whitechapel," an open-access website tracing popular representations of crime, poverty, and sexuality in the Victorian press from 1885-1895.

I am currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on ideas of men's mental illness in the British military before ideas of shell shock. It explores military psychiatry, ideas of trauma and the horrors of war in the nineteenth century.

• SSHRC Insight Grant "Before Shell Shock: Madness and Mental Health in the British ARmy, 1857-1914," (2019-present)
• Laurier Internal Grant "Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper," (2019)
• 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, culture, war, sexuality and psychiatry in Britain and its empire.

• Out of his Mind: Masculinity and Mental illness in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. 
• “Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper: Myths, Monsters, and the real limits of the late-Victorian Detective,” in British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1960, ed. Laura Mayhall and Elizabeth Prevost. Forthcoming: Palgrave Macmillan.  
• “Work and Madness: Overworked Men and Fears of Degeneration, 1860s–1910s,” Journal of Victorian Culture 24:2 (April 2019): 159-178
• "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.