ABOUT ME

I am an historian of the built environment specialising in British architecture of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. My research and writing cover these periods both in Britain and the former British colonial world. It is my contention that the architectural history of the British Isles cannot be fully understood in isolation from that of its one-time global empire. I believe that this history constitutes a wider ‘British world’ of architectural ambition and intervention. I also contend that this history is best comprehended as a manifestation of the energy consumption context from which it emerged, placing the very existence of the Victorian built environment in a meaningful relationship with the large-scale thermo-industrial processes of the Victorian age.

As Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh, I teach and research on these subjects at both undergraduate and graduate level. My scholarship is internationally recognised and has received a number of prestigious awards. I am recipient of both the Hawksmoor Medal (Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain) and the Founders’ Award (Society of Architectural Historians, USA) for outstanding scholarship in the field of architectural history. My first monograph Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c.1840-70 (2013) received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for 2013 from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, the William M. B. Berger Prize for British Art History (2014), the Historians of British Art Book Prize (2015), and was shortlisted for the Whitfield Prize, Royal Historical Society (2014).

I am an editorial board member of ABE Journal and formerly Deputy Editor of Architectural History (2022-25). I have also been an Editorial Advisory Committee member of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2015-19), and am presently a Director of the Society of Architectural Historians in the United States (2024- ).