My research interests focus on modern British social and cultural history; the history of women and gender; the history of intimacy and emotion; material and visual culture. My doctorate explored the material culture of the middle-class home in Victorian England and is published as a book Material Relations: families and middle-class domestic interiors in England, 1850-1910 by Manchester University Press. Material Relations tells the story of nineteenth and early twentieth century middle-class families by exploring the domestic spaces they inhabited and the material goods they prized. The book sheds new light on aspects of family life including love, marriage, sex, childhood and death. Relations between husband and wife were fashioned by drawing-room politeness, and fastidious sexuality mediated in the marital bedroom. The nursery distanced parent and child, glamorising parents and sometimes embittering children.

This research has also appeared in 'Choosing the Chintz: Men, Women and Furnishing the Home from 1850 to the Present,' a special exhibition at the Geffrye Museum from November 2008 to February 2009.

I am currently working on an ESRC-funded project, ‘At Home in the Institution,’ that examines the impact of the design, decoration and furnishing of residential institutional spaces on the experiences of their inmates. The project focuses on three case studies: lunatic asylums (as they were known to contemporaries), schools for middle-class children, and common and charitable lodging houses.