I am a historian with a special interest in modern Scottish history, the history of science and the history of ideas more generally. Currently I am an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews, where am editing a volume of Dugald Stewart’s articles for a new complete works of Dugald Stewart to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Until January 2025 I was a lecturer in 19th-century British history at the University of St Andrews.

My main research interest is science in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland and I have published two books on the  subject: Evolution before Darwin: Theories of the Transmutation of Species in Edinburgh, 1803–1834 and David Brewster and the Culture of Science in Scotland, 1793–1843.