Key details
Post Graduate Researcher
My educational, and professional, background is rather eclectic, with seemingly minimal overlap between them. However, I’ve been able to use each stop on the journey to focus on an area that I am passionate about, building up transferable skills that I will be able to use throughout my PhD.
Academically, I started out as a Law undergrad, before completing my MA in Victorian Studies, many years later, during the early stages of Covid. During my MA, my research focused on female social and cultural history, culminating in a dissertation that sought to understand how women in the long nineteenth century challenged understandings of female identities through needlework.
I joined Greenwich in 2024, to work on my PhD, which I will be studying part time. My research looks at how women of the long-nineteenth century were able to engage with the natural world, a topic I arrived at rather naturally as a combination of my MA interests, alongside my love of gardening.
When I’m not researching for my PhD or in the garden, I can either be found doing my day job working as a Civil Servant, walking my dog, or working on one of my many ongoing arts and crafts work-in-progress projects.
Research / Scholarly interests
My thesis, provisionally titled ‘Gardens, Green Spaces, The Plants in Them, and Women’, seeks to examine women’s engagement with the natural world, exploring the diverse ways they connected with plants, gardens, and green spaces, and how, through these engagements, they were able to negotiate and drive broader social, cultural, scientific, and public health transformations.
I am planning to cover areas such as education; work in private and semi-private gardens; plant scientists and botanical illustrators; engagement with public green spaces in response to public health crises; vegetarianism; travellers and plant specimen collectors.