I was educated at the universities of Lancaster (BA Politics), York (MA Political Philosophy) and Cambridge, where I completed my PhD on 'Henry Parker and Parliamentary Propaganda in the English Civil War' in 1994. I then spent twelve years at the History of Parliament, researching and writing about MPs and parliamentary politics from the period 1640-1660. I was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2004, and joined UCL in 2006.

My research focuses on politics, political culture, and print culture in early modern Britain, and what might be termed the 'politics of information'. I am particularly interested in the way in which the emergence of print transformed high and low politics, in areas such as censorship, propaganda, and political participation. I am concerned to explore the rise of the newspaper and political pamphlets, and of petitions and political lobbying, as well as more ephemeral aspects of print culture, such as posters, handbills and leaflets.

Print culture, I seek to demonstrate, was integral to the process of state formation in early modern Britain, in terms of administration, bureaucracy and political control, as well as to attempts to manipulate political systems by political factions, interest groups and parties, and to influence them by members of the public, whether as individuals or as part of associative groups. Intergral to my work is the attempt to submit early modern printed texts to rigorous contextualisation, in terms of understanding how they were produced and subjected to political influence, the ways in which printers, publishers and booksellers were integrated into political networks, and the ways in which contemporary readers responded to texts and the information that they provided.

My other areas of interest include the nature of representation in early modern Britain, the regicides and the execution of Charles I, and transnational aspects of early modern politics and print culture.

I am co-editor of a monograph series published by Pickering and Chatto, entitled Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period, and serve on the editorial board of Parliamentary History and Media History. I am also a co-convenor of the Seventeenth Century British History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London.

I am interested in supervising doctoral research in all areas of early modern British history, particularly in relation to political culture, print culture, popular politics, parliamentary history, and the British civil wars.