BA (Oxford), MA (Rochester), Ph.D. (Oxford), FRHistS.

Greetings! Thank you for looking at my page.

I joined the History Department at Appalachian in September 2008 as Roy Carroll Distinguished Professor of British History. Born in Berkshire, England, I read Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford, gaining a Prize First in 1987 and a doctorate in 1991. My doctoral thesis was entitled: “The Making of a Middle-Class Liberalism in Manchester, 1815-32: A Study in Politics and the Press.” I was a postgraduate fellow at the University of Rochester, New York, before holding lectureships at the Universities of Sheffield, Swansea, Hull, and Reading in the UK. In 1997 I was elected as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2000 I joined the History Department at the University of Sunderland, UK, and in 2004 I became Professor of Modern British History there. I’ve published books, articles, and chapters on aspects of radicalism and reform in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and more recently I’ve been placing British reform movements and ideas into international and imperial settings.

Current projects include book-length studies of British foreign policy for Continuum History, Lexington Books, Palgrave Macmillan, and Cambria Press. I’m also working on two articles: “The ‘Liberticide Power’: Anti-American Opinion among British Reformers, 1820s-1860s,” and “The Miners’ Champion: Jack Lawson, MP, and the Political and Social Condition of the Durham Miners, 1918-39.” In the longer term I plan to write a book about pro-reform Whig politicians in Britain in the early nineteenth century.

I teach courses in British and international history.

I live in Boone, North Carolina, with my wife Catherine and our children Grace, Jill, and Ethan. We attend First Presbyterian Church in Boone. I enjoy walking in the mountains and forests, watching movies, playing soccer, reading detective novels and historical fiction, and eating chocolate, but not necessarily in that order!