For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by how we make sense of our worlds through making things and telling stories.

This fascination has taken me through art history, teaching, writing and editing with the same questions in mind: always the same questions: how do we tell the stories of bodies, histories, and lives, and how do we find the right form in which to tell them?

I hold a PhD in Southeast Asian art history at the University of Leeds, funded by the AHRC, researching Buddhist art, kingship, and portraiture in Cambodia and involving extensive periods of time living and working in Cambodia.

I've spent over a decade teaching art history at institutions including the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Open University, SOAS University of London, and Fulbright University Vietnam, working with students on everything from Buddhist iconography to writing on contemporary global art for public audiences. Teaching has taught me as much as my research has. I have learned how to help them find the shape of what they're trying to say and to trust in their critical thinking and voice.

That instinct for shape, for structure, for the through-line beneath the material is also something I've come to understand differently since being diagnosed with ADHD. My brain is remarkably good at zooming out: seeing how disparate pieces connect, spotting the shape of a whole argument or story before its parts are in place. I tend to think in diagrams and pictures as well as lengthy prose, which is perhaps why I'm so drawn to the structural, architectural side of a manuscript as well as the lyrical prose. Whether I'm helping a writer develop a memoir or guiding a student through a dissertation, I'm doing the same thing: reading closely, looking for what's already trying to emerge and helping it come fully into view.

My own writing has followed a similar pull toward stories and histories. Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding grew directly out of becoming a mother myself, the strange, profound, under-discussed experience of feeding a child, and out of noticing how little cultural and historical context is spoken about today. Researching and writing it let me bring together my training as a historian with something much more personal.

I live and work between research, writing, teaching, and editing.

I'm available for commissioned writing and press or media commentary, particularly on art history, motherhood, and cultural history. For writing enquiries, you can also contact my agent, Jessica Woollard at DHA Literary Agency.

Perhaps my greatest achievement was becoming the subject of a satirical cartoon in Private Eye.

If you'd like to know more about any part of my work, you'll find more detail elsewhere on this site, or you can simply get in touch.