My first monograph was titled Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement (2020). This book offers the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, it instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. I emphasise how women navigated authoritative roles as 'art workers' by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial and domestic. I stress the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles.
I continue to be very interested in women in the Arts and Crafts movement, evidenced most recently by joining the Advisory Board of the National Endowment of the Humanities funded The Collected Letters of May Morris project (Delaware Art Museum, 2026-2027).
Alongside my articles listed below (under Publications) I have co-edited two collections: Suffrage and the Arts (2018) and Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identity and Social Change in Modern British History (2020). These collections have made two key interventions: the first re-established the central role that artists played in shaping the British suffrage campaigns, and the second argues that the development of professional society in modern Britain cannot be adequately understood without close scrutiny of gender and precarity.
I am now working on my second book Collaborating Couples: Intimacy, Power, and Work in the Anglophone World, 1800–1939 (kindly funded by the British Academy, amongst others). This project will offer the first critical study of the professional and intimate histories of approximately 500 romantically attached couples who collaborated in the same field of work between 1800 and 1939 throughout the Anglophone world. You can find my first open-access article relating to this project here: ‘Marriage, collaboration, and the literary mass market in the English-speaking world, c. 1870-1939.’ Moreover, in May 2026, Dr Sven Yaros and I are co-organising a major international workshop at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany titled 'Power Couples? Collaborations at work and at home, c. 1750-1914' to explore this phenomenon on a global level, and bringing together multidisciplinary scholars from countries including Australia, India, Germany, Romania, USA, France and Hungary (kindly funded by the DFG).
Alongside this, I am currently researching the life of the socialist, pacifist, and feminist Dora Russell (1894-1986). This will form my third monograph. With generous funding from BIRMAC, philosopher Professor Alex Klein and I have been working with ten students from the University of Birmingham and McMaster University (Canada) to transcribe Russell's extensive letter collections and to put together an exhibition titled Dora Russell: Snapshots from a Radical Life (forthcoming).