My research concerns religious and philosophical traditions of South Asia. I study ancient and medieval texts, inscriptions, and other historical documents significant for the cultural history of the Indian sub-continent. I am also interested in the critical examination of rites, rituals, and customs of the Indian religions. I am a keen reader of various genres of Sanskrit literature, starting from the Vedas.

My research interests concern topics of Roman (private) law, both as products of Roman lawyers and as building blocks of civilian legal doctrine from the high middle ages onwards. Topics recently worked on include money in the western legal tradition and the legal history of ‘social choice’, with a specific focus on rules for decision-making in collegiate courts and multi-arbiter proceedings. Other current areas of interest: reciprocity v. altruism in contract law; history and theory of default rules in contract law.

Most of my research revolves around the history of astronomy, chronology, and time-reckoning in medieval and early modern Europe, with a heavy focus on unpublished sources in medieval Latin manuscripts.

I am an intellectual, cultural and religious historian of early modern Europe. I have published extensively on philosophical, scientific, medical, religious, legal and political thought in early modern Europe. Although I have made several discoveries about individuals and institutions (including Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, the Hebraist John Spencer, the early modern study of Persian religious history, and the Society of Apothecaries), I am above all interested in large-scale patterns of change from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, patterns that transcend the influence of any individual or group. My first book, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (2015), demonstrates how almost all educated people in the seventeenth century engaged deeply with the history of ancient philosophy, in stark contrast to the still prevalent stereotype of the period as one that witnessed a move away from humanistic modes of thought. My current project, provisionally entitled An age of erudition, explores, largely on the basis of previously untapped manuscript sources, how from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries ideas about religion and theology were historicised at an institutional level, especially in the universities, and how that institutionalisation in turn led to wider cultural awareness of the historical dimension to Christianity and other religions.

I am a writer and historian, with research interests in twentieth-century Europe and the US. My doctoral thesis examined the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s in transnational perspective through a case study of the links between the movements in the US, UK, and France. I surveyed archival material and conducted life history interviews with activists in all three countries to trace theory, protest tactics, and organisational ideas which spread across national borders. The collection of interviews will be available in future at the British Library. I also write fiction; my debut novel, The Ninth Guest (published in North America as The Last Guest) was published in 2020.