I am a European cultural historian, interested in the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. I study how how the history of consumption and commodities were integral to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries. My recent work positions the British Empire within a broader global framework and I am currently working on an imperial history of public relations. I enjoy teaching comparative histories of gender, consumerism, urban history, food history, and the history of empires, capitalism and globalization.

y current book project, tentatively titled Anonymous Empire: Public Relations at the End of Empire, explores how the relatively new field of public relations managed the process and memory of decolonization between the late 1940s and 1970s.  During these years international public relations campaigns shaped capital investments, promoted capitalist values, and secured colonial relationships decades after political imperial ties were severed.  The project reveals the global power of PR and also demonstrates how global forces shaped the history of public relations.  It offers as well a genealogy of the political power of business in the postwar world.

My books, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017)

Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton University Press, 2000)

Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain, edited by Erika Rappaport, Sandra T. Dawson, Mark Crowley