Notes

BIOGRAPHY

I am a modern historian of  Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Politics based at University of Oxford, where I am currently Stipendiary Lecturer at Hertford and Exeter Colleges. I have held previous posts at Durham, Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin, and King's College London. I specialise in the history of political parties, elections and psephology, ideology, and political language and communication.  I am also interested in women in British politics since 1945, and the modern British Monarchy and Constitution more generally.interested in  the author of the War of Words, a 342 page monograph on Victorian and Edwardian British politics - especially the development of political speeches and communication - which has been praised as 'groundbreaking' and 'seminal' in peer reviews. I have been featured on TV and Radio documentaries including for BBC Radio 4, the Yesterday channel, and as an analyst on 5 News. I am also very interested in the Digital Humanities, especially in interdisciplinary 'big data' research methodologies such as Text Mining.

Much of my research to date has focused on a key methodological question. Namely, how historians can analyse huge multi-million word texts which are physically impossible to read in totality, for example general election campaigns in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, where an estimated billion words of platform speeches were delivered nationwide. My book, the War of Words, explores how quantitative and qualitative text mining techniques originating from Corpus Linguistics can help meet this challenge. More specifically, I demonstrate how the systematic computerised analysis of millions of words of text can lead to new insights and major revisions to historians' current understanding of British political language, which has thus far been based exclusively on manual reading and focused case studies. My other articles - for example on women in politics, the decline of the British Liberal Party, and the politics of Imperialism have been published in leading outlets such as the Historical Journal, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of British Studies, and Twentieth Century British History.

I am also working on electoral violence with collaborators at Durham University, as well as a project with the Wellcome Trust's recently digitised London's Pulse corpus of London Medical Officer of Health reports from 1848-1972.

Outside of my role as a historian, I am best known as the author of the bestselling Alternative Guide to Postgraduate Funding, which has regularly appeared on TV and in newspapers. The Guide has sold 500,000 copies since it first appeared in 2009 and is licensed by most universities in the UK.

 

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