I teach US History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, UK having previously worked at the universities of Cambridge, Bangor, Liverpool and Sheffield. I studied at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the University of Oxford, where I completed my BA in 1995 and my D.Phil in 2001.

I am interested in the intersections of business history with political, economic, intellectual and legal history. Currently I am writing a book for Johns Hopkins UP on the 'politics of scale.' It is a study of critiques of large-scale capitalism in the US since the end of the nineteenth century. I began work on this project during my year (2015-16) as the Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Previously I have published on the New Deal, including Mr. Democrat (2006), a biographical study of FDR's campaign manager Jim Farley, and on the politics of consumption, including an essay on the anti-chain store movement which won the 2009 Constance Rourke prize of the American Studies Association. I have also written on the transnational history of populism, including essays on the global travels of William Jennings Bryan and Robert M. La Follette.