I am an architectural historian with an interest in how architecture has participated in systems of colonial governance and racial capitalism in Australia and the Pacific. My research explores the intersections of architecture with the law, political economy, finance, and extraction, particularly the spatial logics of non-government organisations and other forms of private power. I believe architectural history has an important role to play in uncovering the material legacies of empire and capital, revealing how design has shaped—and been shaped by—systems of power and dispossession.

My writing has been widely published, including in Architecture Beyond Europe, Architectural Histories, Journal of Architecture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Urban History, Fabrications, Geographical Research, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land and Architectural Theory Review. I am a co-Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project, Mapping the Frontiers of Private Property in Australia (DP240100395), which will document the alienation of Crown land in New South Wales. In 2023, I was the Society of Architectural Historians (US) H. Allen Brooks Fellow for a project investigating the links between Australian settler-colonialism and the Indo-Pacific phosphate industry at the turn of the twentieth century. I was Research Fellow at the Architectures of Order LOEWE Research Cluster in 2021, co-hosted by the Goethe University Frankfurt, Technical University Darmstadt, the German Architecture Museum and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. This led to my first book, A Complicated Organism: The Architecture of the Global Moravian Network, 1722-1922 (2024), published by the Centre for Critical Studies in Architecture at the Goethe University Frankfurt. My doctoral research into the role of German missionary organisations within the settler-colonial project in nineteenth-century Far North Queensland (USyd 2020) was awarded the David Saunders Founders Grant by the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand. In 2014, my Honours thesis on the history of Sydney Park received the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President’s Dissertation Medal.

I coordinate research-led subjects in architecture and landscape architecture. These include design studios on alternative housing models, the relationship between real estate and sewerage, as well as history and theory subjects on architectural ethics and the discipline's relationship to the historic phases of capitalism. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and have written and presented on architectural pedagogy in CIRCA: Journal of Architecture and Design, Architecture Bulletin and at the Conference of the Association of Architecture Educators (UK).

I have collaborated extensively with the not-for-profit research-advocacy group Healthabitat since 2014. This has involved running a design studio on the effects of heat on health in remote Indigenous housing, designing school sanitation facilities in Nepal, developing community resources for sanitation programs in South Africa and Ethiopia, and participating in Housing for Health projects in regional and remote Australia. A sanitation project I designed in rural Nepal for the Paul Pholeros Foundation in collaboration with David Donald, Harry Catterns and Shane Marshall received a Commendation Award in the 2025 ArchitectureAU Awards for Social Impact.

I am currently a General Councillor on the History Council of NSW and Associate Editor of Architectural Theory Review. At UTS, I coordinate the Australian Centre for Public History’s Histories of Land and Property Reading Group and, together with Urtzi Grau, I am editor of the UTS School of Architecture’s forthcoming publication series.

I am the primary supervisor of two PhD projects:

Anna Li

Failed Property: Land, Governance and Dispossession in Colonial New South Wales

Secondary: Prof Charles Rice

Samantha Rosner

Drawing Water: Representation, Conflict, and Hydrological Uncertainty in Australia’s Nervous Colonial Landscape of Private Property

Secondary: Prof Charles Rice