About

All content on this site is in various states of abandonment

About me

Leverhulme Funded Postdoctoral Researcher based at the Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism, University of Antwerp. Formerly, Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow (2019-20) at the Institute for Historical Research and CHASE (AHRC) funded Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent.

Currently, I am working on my Leverhulme funded project at the Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism. In this post I am developing a Handwriting Text Recognition (HTR) model for the fourteenth century records of the court of The King’s Bench. Additionally, I am working on an exploration of YouTube medievalisms in order to understand how users of that site are encountering narratives about the medieval world.

Previously I was the Royal Historical Society’s Centenary fellow at the Institute of Historical Resarch and a CHASE funded doctoral candidate based at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) at the University of Kent.

After ten years as a painter and decorator I began my studies at the Open University before completing a BA in History at Kent. Subsequently I found my home during an MA at MEMS where I was began a CHASE AHRC doctoral studentship in 2016.

As part of my CHASE studentship I completed a two-month funded placement at the National Archives using subpoena writs to accurately date over six hundred cases from the Court of Chancery in the late fifteenth century. I also worked with ‘Up on the Downs’, a landscape-based Heritage Lottery Funded project based in the Dover District Area which is exploring how to engage the public with medieval heritage in the Dover area.

My thesis was an investigation of corruption and anti-corruption processes within the development of English government institutions from 1307 to 1348. This work looked at the negotiation of centralised and devolved authority and how this authority, when perceived to behave corruptly, affected the crown and its subjects. For this purpose I constructed a dataset of over 2000 individual cases of wrongdoing collated from anti-corruption investigations carried out in the first half of the fourteenth century. Additionally, I extensively examined a series of political poems which appeared to mimic and mock fourteenth century modes of justice.

I utilise data science methodologies to collect, analyse, and visualise fourteenth century administrative records. I am interested in corruption, digital approaches to the study of the medieval period, Irish history, conceptions of authority, governance studies, football, and cricket.

About the Site

This site is written in markdown using RStudio, the content is pushed to Github, and deployed by Netlify. If you are interested in using a similar approach then please check this guide which was very helpful.