My primary research interests are in conflict and humanitarianism in Africa. I am Principal Investigator on the AHRC grant ‘Children at War: An Historical Analysis of Child and Youth Combatants in African Conflicts, c. 1890-2010’, which traces historical patterns in the recruitment and use of child soldiers across Africa, and also analyzes the evolution of humanitarian campaigning and transnational advocacy against children's involvement in conflict in 1970s to the present. I am interested more widely in African gender histories, histories of youth and childhood, violence and warfare in Africa, anti-landmine campaigning, and in global histories of humanitarianism and human rights. My other research interests are in the history of law, violence and punishment in Africa, particularly on the death penalty in British colonial Africa.

I am Dean of Postgraduate Research and of the Doctoral College, and Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for Research on Africa.

I grew up in Scotland, Bulgaria, Russia and Tanzania. I read for a BA in Modern History at the University of Oxford, before going on to complete an MSt in Imperial and Commonwealth History at the same institution in 2003, where I wrote my dissertation on the Tanganyikan penal system, c.1920-45. After a year spent living in Egypt and Jamaica, I returned to Oxford where I completed my DPhil. in Modern History at St Cross College in 2008, where I was an AHRC Doctoral Scholarship holder and Beit Research Scholar. My doctorate was written on the subject of capital punishment in British colonial Africa. I spent a year lecturing in African and World History at the University of Cambridge, where I was a Fellow of Wolfson College, before arriving at Exeter in September 2008.

I am the Dean of Postgraduate Research and the Doctoral College at Exeter. I was previously the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Director of Postgraduate Research. I am a very keen PhD supervisor and am happy to supervise students in the fields of African history, imperial/global history, and histories of humanitarianism, and in particular those with an interest in the following areas:

• histories of colonial law
• crime and punishment
• death penalty
• violence
• conflict and warfare
• transitional justice and post-conflict reconciliation
• human rights
• histories of global humanitarianism
• gender
• childhood and youth
• human-non-human animal relations

I have acted as an external PhD examiner in African Studies for SOAS, Leeds and Birmingham.

Member of African Studies Association

Senior Member, Wolfson College Cambridge