I’m a historian of the human sciences interested in intersections between left-wing politics and the psy’ disciplines, Communist and anti-Communist theories of the mind, histories and theories of radical psychiatry, theories and practices of Freudo-Marxism, and emotional histories of the left.

My second book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024) explores the psychological toll of political struggle in historical perspective, asking how activists have made sense of or worked through the emotional impacts of their political experiences, whether collectively or in isolation.

I write an irregular newsletter called ‘Unconsciousness raising’ that explores overlaps, contradictions and antagonisms between left-wing political movements and psychoanalysis (and other psy sciences). You can sign up here.

I’m currently working on two books: Communist Cases: Soviet and Chinese Emigres, US Social Science and the Cold War, an academic monograph for OUP, and Memory Wipe: A Cultural History of the ‘End of History’, a book about the long 1990s for Verso. I am also interested in revenge.

My first monograph Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History was published as part of the Palgrave Macmillan series ‘Mental Health in Historical Perspective’ in 2020.

I teach history at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. I joined Strathclyde in 2019 to work on a project on Cold War era social science projects based in the US that investigated the ‘Soviet mind’ and am now researching international campaigns against the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. I was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin. I completed my PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that I worked in theatre admin and production for five years in London.

I’ve written for both academic and non-academic publications on topics including rayon stockings, gender and the death drive, utopian pedagogy, Communist motherhood, wrinkles, the aesthetics of fMRI, Soviet babies, revolutionary commemoration, British antipsychiatry, mourning, Carl Jung’s influence on Jordan Peterson, depression, perfume and Ulrike Meinhof’s brain. I’ve been part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy since 2016. I’m also a contributing editor at Parapraxis.