Writing

 
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My research and writing explores the deep connections between America and Scotland during the era of the American Revolution. I am especially interested in the imperial politics of emigration from Scotland to North America in this period, how Americans, Scots, and other peoples used the law on both sides of the Atlantic to defend their interests in the aftermath of the War for Independence, and how we can use digital technology to reconstruct the past and recover voices often hidden in the archives.

My book-in-progress tells a transatlantic story of Scottish emigration to North America set against the backdrop of the imperial crisis that produced the American Revolution. Using the lives of people such as Flora MacDonald, John Witherspoon, Lord Advocate Henry Dundas, and Archibald McCall, it explores how emigration reflected broader change throughout the British Empire in the mid to late eighteenth century and the debates it engendered among and between Scots and Americas as they increasingly questioned their place in the British Atlantic world.

I am also at work on essays based on my Court of Session Digital Archive Project that examines how American Loyalists continued waging the Revolution in Scottish and American courts long after the war ended.

I’ve been fortunate to publish for both academic and public audiences. A sample of my work is below. I am happy to provide a full C.V. upon request.

  • Review Essay: Historical Association Podcasts (Forthcoming in Early Modern Digital Review, 2023)

  • “The Law of Loyalism: Scottish Loyalists, the Court of Session, and the American Revolution,” Journal of Atlantic Studies, Special Issue: Scottish Loyalism in the Atlantic World, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2023.2240948 

  • “Mourning Thomas Jefferson’s Estranged Father.” Georgian Papers Programme Blog, 29 January 2020. https://georgianpapers.com/2020/01/29/mourning-thomas-jeffersons-estranged-father/

  • “‘Ours is a Court of Papers’: Exploring Scotland and the British Atlantic World using the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project,” International Review of Scottish Studies, 44 (2019): 10-19. 10.21083/irss.v44i0.5883.

  • with Randall Flaherty, “Reading Law in the Early Republic: Legal Education in the Age of Jefferson” in The Founding of Mr. Jefferson’s University, edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019).

  • “One is the Loneliest Number Among the Few and the Many: A Review of Richard Alan Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic: The One, The Few, and the Many” in Reviews in American History 45, no. 4 (2017): 576-581. 10.1353/rah.2017.0084.

  • “The Admiral and the Aide-de-Camp: The Revolutionary War Correspondence of Sir Samuel Hood and Jacob de Budé.” Georgian Papers Programme Blog, 3 May 2017. https://georgianpapers.com/2017/05/03/the-admiral-and-the-aide-de-camp/