• Historical geographies of ideas
• History of geographical knowledge

My research interests include the cultural history and geography of the life and earth sciences, with a particular emphasis on religious responses to scientific developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My earliest work examined the reception of glacial theory in Victorian Edinburgh, investigated the historical geographies of Scottish natural history societies in the period 1831-1900 and, with Charles Withers and Rebekah Higgitt, explored the role of geography in the work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1831 – c.1933. My book on natural history societies in Victorian Scotland was published by Pickering & Chatto in 2009 and was awarded the Frank Watson Book Prize for Scottish History in 2011. In 2014, I completed a two-year AHRC-funded project on science in nineteenth-century Belfast. I have also written about the metaphysical works of the geologist James Croll and the reception of ideas about human evolution in the context of religious debates about the creation of Eve. More recent work has centred on public speech as a situated mode of interaction between science and culture in the nineteenth century. A monograph on this subject examining the lecture tours of five British celebrity scientists in Gilded Age America is nearing completion. With Professor David N. Livingstone, I have just embarked on a 27 month project investigating debates about evolution and theology in the early twentieth century. This is part of a larger John Templeton Foundation-funded project on conjunctive explanations in science and religion (CESAR).   

GGY1011 Human Geographies of the Modern World

GGY1012 Spaces of Development

GGY2055 Research Design and Professional Development

GGY2056 Contemporary Approaches to Geographical Enquiry

GGY3066 Geography, Science and Society

GGY3081 Dissertation