I did my BA in Spanish and Italian at Trinity College Dublin, before going on to complete an MA in Hispanic Studies at University College London and a DPhil in Modern and Medieval Languages at Trinity College,  University of Oxford. Before taking up my post at Birmingham, I held teaching posts at the University of Warwick and the University of Oxford.

My research interests lie primarily in Mexican visual culture. My current book project explores how visual and material culture shaped a period of religious conflict in Mexico spanning from the Catholic-led Cristero War (1926-1929) and the so-called "segunda Cristiada" to the rise of the right-wing Catholic Sinarquista movement in the late 1930s. The project explores how images and objects served to narrativise violence and mobilise actors in this context. I curated a commemorative digital exhibition on the photography of the Cristero War in collaboration with Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación. 

My first book Diego Rivera and Juan Rulfo: Post-revolutionary Body Politics (1922-1965) comparatively examined contrasting representations of the body in the visual and literary works of Diego Rivera and Juan Rulfo to trace evolving intellectual and artistic interpretations of post-revolutionary nationhood in Mexico from the euphoria of the 1920s to the phase of intellectual disenchantment beginning at mid-century. It analyses canonical as well as previously overlooked essays, murals, illustrations, photographs, films and literary texts against a historical backdrop constructed from print media, correspondence and previously unexamined archival materials to provide a multimedia history of Mexico’s shifting post-revolutionary cultural, political and intellectual landscapes during these decades of societal transformation.

Research networks and organisations: Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI), Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), Association for Latin American Art (ALAA), British Art Network (BAN), UK Latin American Historians Network (UKLAH), Historians of Catholic Mexico (HISTCATMEX), UoB Centre for Material Cultures and Materialities (CMCM).