About Me

I love history and have been teaching in the United Kingdom since 2008. St Leonards School gave me my start on a short-term contract just after I finished my PhD. From there, I secured my first permanent position at a wonderful, all-boys, school in England: Westcliff High School for Boys. Westcliff is academically selective which made teaching a real treat. I was also fortunate because Westcliff helped me gain my Qualified Teacher Status while working full-time. During my five years at Westcliff, I was promoted to second in the history department and Head of Year 9. In 2014, West Buckland School hired me as their Head of History, and I’ve been there ever since! “West Buck” is a lovely independent school in the West Country with consistently strong academic results. Did I say I have a PhD? I earned that in 2008 from McMaster University consistently rated one of the best universities in Canada. My specialty then was military history, and I managed to get my dissertation published as a book in 2013: The American Occupation of Australia, 1941-45: A Marriage of Necessity. I also earned my master’s degree from McMaster where I won the Ezio Cappadocia Graduate Prize for European History.

Today, I teach mainly modern European history: the French and Russian Revolutions, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Cold War and German Unification. Beyond Europe, I teach the Industrial Revolution in Britain and modern China. If your child enjoys exciting political history, I urge you to explore my site and see what I can offer you.