I am a writer and historian of nature in modern British culture. At the University of Sussex in the UK, I am a Research Associate in Media & Cultural Studies where you can see my academic profile.
I grew up in the suburbs – first in New Jersey and then in the West Midlands. My formative experiences of the natural world were ordinary. There was a nature table at kindergarten to which I contributed the silken hanging nest of a Baltimore Oriole that must have been found in the garden. Later I looked after a young lame squirrel that appeared one spring in our garden in the margins of the Birmingham conurbation. The Observer’s Book of Birds was on the window ledge in the kitchen. And in 1979 I became absorbed in David Attenborough’s Life on Earth series.
For the last 25 years I have lived in East London from where I now contemplate the natural world. There is plenty of it about in the city, though there are no misty mountain tops to behold, nor the cry of the curlew on the breeze. My research and writing works with the everyday presence (and absence) of nature in modern urban lives.
My first book has come out this year. Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio and Modern Life, 1914–1945 moves from the presence and meaning of birds around the Western Front trenches to the broadcasting of recorded British birdsong on the radio by Ludwig Koch during WWII. It examines the ideas of national recovery after war requiring the quiet of pastoral nature, the advent of radio as a new domestic sound that was believed to be able to channel a kind of silence into homes from the cosmos, as well as interwar rambling as a pursuit driven by the need to connect the body and mind to sensual pleasures that were not available in town and city living. It is a development of PhD research undertaken at the University of Sussex.
Research themes
My research interests follow and connect several paths within Victorian and twentieth-century British culture and society:
Domestic pets as hybrid forms of the natural world that we like to have close to us. My next project looks at the rise, fall and now near-extinction of bird-keeping at home.
The place of the natural world in the management of modern urban lives, particularly in terms of emotions, well-being and the concept of ‘nature cure’.
Links between ideas about Britishness and national animals, forms of landscape, natural history pursuits and bird-watching in peace and wartime.
BBC representations of nature, especially before Attenborough (nature study for schools on the radio, gardening and farming programmes, the beginnings of the Natural History Unit).
The senses, listening in particular, as a way of attending to and understanding environments of all kinds, natural and artificial.
Publishing and digital media background
Previously, I worked first as a writer and editor in public sector and commercial organisations, and then for two decades as a digital media researcher and strategist for, among many, the London School of Economics, SOAS, the British Council, the Department of Health, NHS Direct, John Prescott’s central government department ODPM, Vodafone, Decca Music and British Airways.
Projects
Close to You: Wild Birds in London Homes
I’m working on a new book about the rise and fall of bird-keeping in the home – wild songbirds like goldfinches, ‘exotic’ imported species like parrots and domesticated canaries and budgies. Why were these birds kept with such passion in Victorian London by people of all classes and what happened to this now almost extinct tradition? I look at bird-keeping as a way to bring the natural world up close, bring the outdoors indoors. I consider the perceived chattiness and sociability of birds as well as impressions of their musicality. The status of birds as sporting creatures, trophies of imperial power, objects of affection and victims of human domination are all in play here.
Edited collection from the 2021 Winged Geographies workshop with Olga Petri (University of Cambridge)
This book collection of twelve new essays examines avian engagement with space and territories as well as the impact of bird behaviour on the human sense of place, spatiality and the heavens.
Ruskin’s musical stones
The geology of the Lake Distinct vibrated with musical energy, John Ruskin believed. Several men working with the stones in the hills around Keswick created a set of xylophone instruments, which they took to tour around England and the east coast of the USA.
Birds in the boozer
Linnets, chaffinches and goldfinches were highly prized singing birds who were trained to win competitions in the upstairs rooms of many an East London public house. This history of wild birds and people is hardly documented.
(Photograph: Marketa Luskakova, 1975)