Profile
Historians increasingly have access to huge amounts of textual data. My research explores the potential of interdisciplinary methods as means of approaching the ever-growing digital archive.
Click here for a video summary of my research.
My thesis uses corpus linguistics; the machine-assisted analysis of language in very large bodies of text, to examine attitudes towards immigrants and refugees in nineteenth century newspapers. It is part of an ESRC Studentship in collaboration with the British Library. Their vast digital collections give us an insight into the shifting language of immigration and refuge in Victorian Britain.
Affiliated with CASS (Corpus Approaches to the Social Sciences)
My research interests include:
- nineteenth century Britain
Current Teaching
I currently teach on HIST100 'From the Medieval to the Modern', a first year 'big picture' course.
You can also find me at the FASS Academic Writing Space, where I help students to develop their academic writing and study skills.
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Research Grants
ESRC CASE Studentship in Collaboration with the British Library.
Additional Information
Conferences, workshops, and symposiums:
- 'The Language of Immigration in the Victorian Press: A Corpus Approach', European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), Belfast, 2018.
- ‘Anarchical firebrands and murderers […] in their London Dens’: Testing the limit of British ‘tolerance’, ‘Foreigner’ in Britain Conference, King’s College, London 2017.
- ‘The Language of Immigration in the Victorian Press: A Historian’s Perspective on Corpus Linguistics’, Invited speaker at the ‘Corpus Research in Linguistics and beyond’ seminar series, King’s College, London 2017.
- ‘The Language of Immigration in the Victorian Media’, Invited speaker at the ‘Feed the Mind’ public seminar series, British Library, London, 2016.
- ‘A Corpus Approach to the Discourses of Migration’, Social Science History Association Conference (SSHA), Chicago, 2016.
- ‘A Historian’s Perspective on Context and Corpora’, IVACS Conference, Bath, 2016.
- ‘Aliens, Foreigners and Migrants: a corpus approach to attitudes towards immigrant groups using the British Library’s nineteenth century newspaper collection’, Social History Society Conference, Lancaster University, 2016.
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