Building on my training in the history of medicine and the environment, I am currently working on a new project – funded by the Leverhulme Trust – that spans these fields.
I am researching a new book, currently titled The Ends of Coal. This project explores British coal’s impacts and legacies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than trace the ‘end’ of coal, I follow the lesser-known ‘ends’ of coal, interrogating its longer-term consequences for the landscape, health and population, the emergence of environmentalism, as well as empire and decolonisation. The book incorporates the perspectives of workers, managers of public industries, scientists, economists, activists, and cultural figures like novelists to challenge our understanding of what happened to a resource that had previously enabled Britain to become the first industrial nation and command a global empire.
