As a global historian of science, my research seeks to understand how the interaction of different cultures of knowledge produced new sciences that circulated across the world in the early modern period. I am particularly interested in how long-distance corporations, such as the Society of Jesus and the Dutch East India Company, appropriated and globalised diverse, local non-European understandings of the natural world.

My current work (and second book project, The Inn of the Indian Ocean) consists of a longue-durée oceanic history of cultures of natural knowledge at the Cape of Good Hope. This project aims to examine why European writers so often tethered southern Africa’s human and natural history to that of the “East Indies.” Almost every traveller voyaging between Europe and the East Indies spent time at the Cape, where they engaged with the Indigenous Khoekhoen, enslaved Malays, and European settlers, producing new, braided knowledges in the process. Engaging with scholarship across cultural anthropology, material culture studies, and the environmental humanities, The Inn of the Indian Ocean explores how colonial encounters in southern Africa reshaped European conceptions of ancient environments and their impact on the present. An article excerpted from this project is forthcoming in Past & Present.

My first book, The Tartar Moment: Crises and the Globalization of Chinese Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press. It explores how the Manchu conquest of Ming China during the “Little Ice Age” reshaped the intellectual history of environmental and political thought in early modern Europe. The book highlights the pivotal role of the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini in translating Chinese cultures of crisis for European audiences. Contributing to contemporary debates in the history of science, The Tartar Moment contends that catastrophic times and uncertainty about the future created fruitful conditions for cross-cultural epistemic exchanges. The book thus advocates an urgent rethinking of the nature of cross-cultural encounters in the history of science, emphasizing the importance of crises as generators of new, braided cultures of knowledge.

I was trained in Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where I specialised in the History and Philosophy of Science and was awarded the Jacob Bronowski Prize in 2018. Subsequently, I read for an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In 2023, I was awarded my PhD, titled 'Globalising China: Jesuits, Eurasian Exchanges, and the Early Modern Sciences', by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and St Edmunds College, Cambridge. This work was supported by a Freer Prize Fellowship of the Royal Institution. During my PhD, I held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Descartes Centre in Utrecht. I also spent a month working at the Royal Society Library in London, supported by a Lisa Jardine Award. After my doctorate, I was elected the Lumley Junior Research Fellow in History at Magdalene College, Cambridge and was awarded an Early Career Fellowship Grant by the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust for my project "Southern Africa and the Early Modern Globalization of Knowledge," hosted in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.

I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Affiliated Scholar of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. In both 2023 and 2024, I was shortlisted for the BBC New Generation Thinker Award. My PhD was awarded the 8th Dissertation Prize (2025) of the Division for the History of Science and Technology (DHST) in the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST) and the Coventry-Emsley Prize of St Edmund's College, Cambridge, for the most outstanding PhD in Classics, History, Philosophy or Theology. I also received a special mention in the Premio Giovani (Early Career Prize) 2024 from the Società Italiana di Storia della Scienza (Italian Society for the History of Science) for my article "Astronomical Chronology, the Jesuit China Mission, and Enlightenment History," published in the Journal of the History of Ideas.