My teaching and research focuses upon British cultural history in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I work on the history of science and technology, particularly the communication and popularisation of science, and the technologies which made that possible. I am also interested in the history of publishing, reading and authorship; in the historical relations between science and religion; and in popular science.

I am currently leading an AHRC-funded project on the world's oldest scientific journal; we are interested in the history of scholarly publishing, and the editorial and commercial practices associated with scholarly publishing.

My last book was the prize-winning Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the business of publishing, 1820-1860 (2012), which investigates the connections between technology and instructive publishing in the mid-19th-century.