My research to date has focused on what men’s relationship to their possessions tells us about masculine experience and culture in the long eighteenth century (1666-1832). Examining men’s material culture through a range of interdisciplinary sources, my doctoral research surveyed middling and elite men’s objects including children’s toys, domestic furniture, carriages, snuffboxes, canes, and hunting weapons. I am currently expanding on this research to write a monograph on what objects can tell us about masculine culture and experience in eighteenth-century Britain and its empire.
This year, I am working on three research publications: one on the emotional language men use when writing about their material culture, another on attitudes to country sports in early modern England, and finally a book chapter on carriages in satirical culture, c.1760-1830.
As well as this, I am also developing a new research project on early modern clergymen’s attitudes and experiences of consumerism, material goods, and fashion. It seeks to better understand how, and indeed if, men’s professional and denominational identity impacted their consumer behaviour and attitudes across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This research seeks to assert the importance of religion and occupation in men’s experiences.