My scholarly work sits at the intersection of the history of chemistry, the Scottish Enlightenment, political economy, digital pedagogy, and the infrastructures through which knowledge gets made durable.
In Progress
Primitive Accumulation with a Chemical Vocabulary
Monograph in progress.
This book argues that chemistry supplied the vocabulary in which the commodification of nature was thought, justified, and operationalized. Following that vocabulary from Lowland Scottish soils to Jamaican sugar boiling-houses to the nineteenth-century guano frontier, it demonstrates that the rationalization of matter and the dispossession of those who worked it were a single braided process: primitive accumulation, the ideology of Improvement, chemical governance, and colonial commodity-frontier extraction as mutually reinforcing strands rather than parallel stories.
The argument extends my 2013 dissertation, on chemistry as a materials science built on affinity, and my 2020 Annals of Science article, on slavery as a structural condition of Scottish Improvement, into a single sustained treatment. It traces the chemical accounting of soil fertility forward to the metabolic rift and the extractive, input-dependent agriculture it licensed.
Publications
“Choose Your Own Adventure: Gamified Course Design in History of Science”
Co-authored with Kathleen Sheppard. International Journal of Designs for Learning 12 2 (2021), pp. 40-48. DOI: 10.14434/ijdl.v12i2.28949
A design study of a gamified, choice-based history-of-science survey course. Drawing on quest-based platforms and game mechanics such as XP, badges, levels, prerequisites, and rapid feedback loops, the article shows how asynchronous and hybrid courses can let students choose both content paths and assignment modalities while still practicing historical analysis, source interpretation, and argumentation.
Reporting on an iterative course redesign across online, blended, and face-to-face formats, we argue that gamification addresses a specific problem of asynchronous online learning - weak motivation and self-management - without abandoning the core learning objectives of a history-of-science survey.
“Chemistry and Slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment”
Annals of Science 77 2 (2020), pp. 155-168. DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2020.1738747
Against the familiar image of the Scottish Enlightenment as primarily abolitionist, this article shows Scots’ disproportionate participation in the ownership, management, and medical treatment of enslaved people in the Caribbean. Chemistry, I argue, was not only a tool of Scottish agricultural reform but also of plantation medicine, spa promotion, botanical appropriation, and sugar-processing rationalization.
Following the Edinburgh-trained physician Thomas Dancer to Jamaica, the article traces how Scottish mineral-water chemistry and chemico-medical training were adapted to the management of enslaved bodies and the commodification of colonial nature, reframing Scottish Enlightenment chemistry as entangled with, rather than merely adjacent to, the economy of slavery.
“Reform and Religious Heterodoxy in Thomas Robert Malthus’s First Edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population”
Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science 19 (2017), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.23925/1980-7651.2017v19;p1-17
This article rereads the 1798 first edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population as a Lockean, liberal-dissenting, Foxite Whig exploration of necessity, mind, and reform, not the Burkean defense of class hierarchy that dominant historiography has made of it.
Reconstructing Malthus’s formative world - his father Daniel Malthus, Warrington Academy, Gilbert Wakefield, Joseph Priestley, and the Foxite opposition - alongside the two theological chapters later removed from the Essay, I argue that Malthus’s population principle was a theory of mind and moral development in the Lockean tradition, and that his criticism of the Poor Law reflected liberal concern for the poor’s independence and liberty rather than indifference to their suffering.
Chemical Affinity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Physiology and Agriculture
PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2013. Supervisor: Peter Barker. Dissertation PDF
This dissertation re-centers eighteenth-century chemistry around the theory of chemical affinity rather than treating combustion and the French Chemical Revolution as the whole story. Tracing a distinctive Scottish affinity tradition centered on William Cullen, Joseph Black, and their students, it shows how affinity organized explanations of physiology, mineral waters, and agricultural improvement alike, making chemistry inseparable from medicine, landed patronage, and Enlightenment political economy.
The dissertation is the foundation document for my later argument that eighteenth-century chemistry functioned as a materials science: a classificatory, reactive science that rendered natural substances measurable, comparable, and available for commodification.
“The Instrumental Reality of Phlogiston in Great Britain”
HYLE: The International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry 18 2 (Dec. 2012), pp. 175-194. PDF
Against both the standard “Lavoisier overthrows Stahlian phlogiston” narrative and recent revisionist accounts, this article argues that British pneumatic chemists - Cavendish, Cullen, Black, Irvine, Crawford, and above all Richard Kirwan - constructed in the 1750s-1780s an entirely new phlogiston, identified with inflammable air and fully measurable in weight, volume, and heat capacity.
This British phlogiston survived as a serious, quantitative research program until 1791, when it failed not because phlogiston was imaginary but because Kirwan could not experimentally sustain one specific theoretical claim. The Chemical Revolution, I argue, is better understood as a competition between two new pneumatic-chemistry research programs than as Lavoisier’s defeat of an outdated orthodoxy.
Richard Kirwan’s Chemistry: Heat, Affinity, and Phlogiston in the 1780s
MA thesis, University of Oklahoma, 2008. Thesis PDF
This thesis reclaims Richard Kirwan from his reputation as chemistry’s failed phlogiston holdout by reconstructing his 1780s chemistry as a coherent, interlocking system: Irvinist heat theory, quantified affinity, inflammable-air phlogiston, pneumatic chemistry, mineralogy, and applied chemistry in agriculture, meteorology, and bleaching.
It argues that Lavoisier and the French chemical school were often responding to Kirwan’s specific, sophisticated system rather than to an undifferentiated Stahlian doctrine, a claim that anticipates my 2012 HYLE article and set the direction for the dissertation that followed.