My name is Kerry. I was not destined to be a historian. Growing up in working-class South London, I actually wanted to be a dancer, beautician, or cabin crew. That all changed when an open-ended Year 8 project sent me down a maritime history rabbit hole after Graínne Ní Mhaílle, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Graínne, Anne, and Mary (and the kind support of my teachers) set me on a path to studying the colonial, global, and social histories of the early modern period and becoming the first person in my family to go to university.

After graduating, I returned home to South London to teach history in local secondary schools. As the world shut down in 2020, a bereavement and a big approaching birthday pushed me to finally pursue the MPhil I’d wanted to complete for some time. Based at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, between 2021 and 2022, I researched and wrote a thesis which traced the movement of Indigenous American and Luso-African men, women, and children through the networks of seventeenth-century colonial promoter and Puritan ‘pirate’ Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.

After a year in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic world, I returned metaphorically to England in 2022 to begin my AHRC-funded PhD. In partnership with the National Trust and based at the OU, my thesis explored how extra-European objects and commodities shaped the lives of Restoration courtiers through the lens of the Anglo-Scottish power couple, the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale. In the course of my thesis, I trawled through Restoration-era inventories for global objects and furnishings, traced the amount of nutmeg, sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate consumed in dining rooms and private closets, read bills and letters documenting the Duke’s love of Virginia tobacco, and stared intently at cabinets of glimmering Japanese lacquer, polychromatic Chinese screens, and some of the earliest surviving examples of British chinoiserie.

Having successfully defended my thesis in July 2026, I currently juggle a part-time Research Associate role at the University of Sheffield with freelance work and my own research projects. To learn more about my career and work, scroll up and click the ‘work’ tab, or to discuss global, colonial, and social approaches to the familiar Tudor and Stuart periods, fill in the contact box below.