RGS

Biography

Biography

I joined Keele in September 2012, having previously taught at the University of Gloucestershire, and the University of Manchester. My research training was also at Manchester, from where I gained my MA in 2007 and PhD, on turn-of-the-century cultures of mountain leisure in England and Germany, in 2011.

Much of my work revolves around the interaction between people and their environments in the modern era, with a particular focus on outdoors leisure as a generator of place, the use and appropriation of space for recreational purposes, the intersection of my work with bottom-up heritage and community projects, and embodied environmentalism. More recently, I have also developed a focus on twenty-first century heritage, environmental histories of the late-twentieth century, and post-war leisure. My first book, Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany was published in 2020 by Palgrave Macmillan.

In 2018, I was a 'New Generation Thinker', taking part in a scheme run jointly by the BBC and AHRC to recruit public humanities speakers for the future. Since then, I have made a series of national broadcasts on radio 3, and hope to do many more.

Since 2020, I have developed projects alongside long-term research partners Urban Wilderness CIC, with a particular focus on industrial heritage in the Stoke-on-Trent area. Much of this research is participatory - I'm interested in finding more creative ways to enable people to tell their own stories.

In 2023, I was awarded seedcorn funding to develop a project on the Environmental History of Ultraviolet Light in the UK.

In 2024, I began work as the co-director of SURF: the Sustainable Rural Futures Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Programme: you can find out more about this and the funding on offer here: https://www.keele.ac.uk/surf/

School of Humanities
Chancellor's Building
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5AA
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 733109

Head of School
Dr Nick Seager
Room: CBB1.038 (Chancellor's Building, 'B' Extension)
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 733142
Email: n.p.seager@keele.ac.uk

School and college outreach
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 734009
Email: outreach@keele.ac.uk