I am an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam and Co-Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History. I am a historian of modern architecture, with a specific focus on the global circulation of architectural ideas, building materials, and technologies in the twentieth century. My research explores the transformation of the built environment in response to European colonial expansion, particularly in West Africa. Before coming to the University of Amsterdam, I taught at New College of Humanities (now Northeastern University) and worked as a Leverhulme-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. I completed my Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020. I teach a variety of courses on architectural history in the BA Art History and the MA Architectural and Urban History.

My first book, Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (forthcoming in 2025), written together with Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, and Claire Tunstall, is an architectural history of  West Africa through the lens of the United Africa Company, the largest British trading company active in the region the nineteenth- and twentieth century. My other book project, based on my PhD research, also focuses on architecture in 'British' Africa and explores the Colonial Office's campaign to construct modern, community-oriented housing projects across the African colonies during the last, violent decades of imperial rule. Recent articles, such as 'Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa,' written with Iain Jackson and Ewan Harrison, ' 'Build Your Own House': Betty Spence's Design Research in 1950s South Africa', co-authored with Hannah le Roux, and 'Property, Land, and Race in the Colonial Built Environment: An Interview with Itohan Osayimwese' were published in ABE Journal, Architectural Theory Review and Architectural Histories. Together with Michael Faciejew, I am editing a special issue of Architecture Beyond Europe, 'Transactional Spaces: Currency in the Imperial Built Environment', forthcoming in 2024. 

A new, four-year research project together with David Duindam, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture and Heritage in Indonesia around Independence, investigates the production and use of concrete in Indonesia in the twentieth century. Starting in 2025, this project is supported by a Starting Grant from NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). 

My research has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, MIT's Aga Khan Program and the MIT Africa-Program. In May and June of 2023, I co-convened the 'Architecture Summer Series', a series of five lectures showcasing novel approaches in British architectural history at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. More recently, I made a map of Modern Architecture in Amsterdam, which was published by Blue Crow Media.