I am an Assistant Professor in European Studies with a focus on climate change and conflict at the University of Amsterdam, having joined the Faculty of Humanities in October 2020. Prior to this, I was a Lecturer in Geography at Nottingham Trent University (2018-20) and a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Exeter (2017-18). My PhD research was completed in the Department of Geography at Durham University and focused on the construction of racial and national identities in US and EU climate security discourses.

With a background as a political geographer, my research interests are broadly concerned with climate change politics (in the UK and EU) and informed by critical geopolitics, feminist theory and postcolonial theory. One strand of this research looks at how climate security discourses are linked to religious and racial identities, specifically in the context of changing imagined geographies of ‘Europe’. A second strand is concerned with thinking through political debates which link climate change, conflict and terrorism together in climate security discourses. A final strand of this research explores some of the discursive frames which govern political contestation over climate mitigation and decarbonisation, for example ‘bullying’ and ‘extremism’. This final strand is also the focus of an NWO-XS-SSH grant examining discourses of ‘extremism’ and ‘counter-extremism’ in British climate politics (2024).

At the UvA, I teach on a range of European Studies courses. These include The Contemporary EU: Process and Policies, The Geopolitics of Climate Security: A Critical Introduction, and the European Politics Simulation Exercise. I co-coordinate the BA in European Studies with a specific focus on the English language track and the second and third years of the programme. I also maintain an active interest in the politics of climate change in higher education, thinking about the pedagogical issues raised by environmental challenges, geographical education and climate change, and the role of teachers as political subjects in responding to climate breakdown. I currently co-coordinate a Jean Monnet Module on ‘European Climate Imaginaries’ which explores these themes in the higher education context.