I grew up in Northern California and completed my undergraduate degree at Princeton, where I designed my own Concentration in Linguistics and studied a variety of natural and artificial languages including Latin, Russian, and Klingon.

After a year working in publishing in New York, I came to St John’s College, Cambridge, on a Pelling Scholarship for an MPhil in Early Modern History. I then moved to the other Cambridge for a PhD in History at Harvard, much of which I completed as an itinerant researcher working out of some five-dozen libraries across the US and the UK, on the hunt to see every 17th-century shorthand manual I could find.

Before being admitted as a Title A Fellow at Trinity in October 2025, I spent most of the year working as Manuscript Cataloguer at the College of Arms, producing a detailed catalogue of 17th-century heraldic visitation records.

My research revolves around language and its media. I am compelled by how language has been understood, studied, and reimagined over time, and the ways in which intellectual conceptions of language have been shaped by the strictures of script and print. To date, my dissertation and many of my publications have centred on the invention, development, and dissemination of shorthand, and I am currently completing my first monograph, ‘The Making of Shorthand Manuals in Early Modern England’, a detailed study and descriptive bibliography of shorthand manuals printed before 1700.

While at Trinity, my focus is on a wider corpus of linguistic works produced in late 16th- and 17th-century England: books that not only investigated the English vernacular, but aimed to alter the course of language use on a grand scale. Alongside shorthand manuals, these works include treatises of spelling reform, studies of phonetics and phonology, grammars of universal or philosophical languages, and proposals for finger-spelling and sign languages.

My research has been supported by fellowships from Harvard, the Bibliographical Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Folger, Beinecke, Newberry, and Huntington libraries, and the Library of Congress.