Education

BA (1999) University of Maryland, College Park
MA (2001) and PhD (2005) Columbia University

Biography and research interests

I am interested in early modern attempts to connect science, technology, empire, and economy. My research focuses especially on the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British world.

My first book, William Petty and the Origins of Political Arithmetic (Oxford University Press, 2009), used the manuscript archive of Sir William Petty (1623-1687) to show how a new discourse of quantitative, scientific governance, "political arithmetic," resulted from a combination of Baconian ideals, mechanical philosophy, and alchemical ideas being applied to the problem of transforming politically and culturally distinct populations in colonial Ireland and beyond as well as managing religious difference and labouring populations in Britain. My second book, Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), argues that a series of engagements over three centuries with the qualities of specific groups – husbandmen, vagrants, the Irish, and colonial and colonized populations across the Atlantic – created population as an object of transformation, and made the transformation of populations a central task of government and a key component of the public good. Both William Petty (in 2010) and Human Empire (in 2023) were awarded the John Ben Snow Prize, given annually by the North American Conference on British Studies for "the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century."

With the support of a 2020-24 SSHRC Insight Grant, I have begun research on a third book, Engines of Division, looking at the role of technological projects and mechanical inventions in Ireland, the English Caribbean, and beyond, circa 1650-1720. Using manuscripts in UK, Irish, and Caribbean archives, I hope to elucidate how the perceived implications of technology changed between colonial contexts, and how these differences reflected and informed practical and ideological engagements with labour and constructions of humanity and race. I am also interested in the history of scientific and economic projects and projecting transnationally and globally, in the early modern period and beyond, something I have pursued in collaboration with other scholars. Vera Keller (University of Oregon) and I edited a 2016 special issue of Early Science and Medicine devoted to the history of projecting; together with Kelly Whitmer (Sewanee), we are currently editing another collection, "Knowledge and Power: Projecting the Modern World", for the Journal for the History of Knowledge, to appear in 2025.

I have published research articles in Osiris, History of Science, Irish Historical Studies, the Journal of British Studies, The William and Mary Quarterly and other journals, and contributed chapters to several edited volumes on the history of political and economic thought, early social science, and Ireland -- including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History and The Cambridge History of Ireland. I've also written for broader audiences in History Compass, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Conversation, and Slate, and my work has been featured in Pour la Science and the London Review of Books.

A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), I have been an Associate Editor of the Journal of British Studies and am currently on the Advisory Board for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Student supervision and placement

Former Honours and MA students of mine have gone on to further study at McGill and Dalhousie in Canada as well as Columbia, the CUNY Graduate Center, NUI Galway, Oxford, and

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