• Vita

    I am a historian of modern Europe working at the intersection of legal, intellectual and political history. My forthcoming first book, The Quest for Law: The Historical School between the German Constitution and International Law, is a contextual study of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the founder of the historical school of law. The book explores the wider significance of Savigny’s jurisprudence in Germany’s ‘stateless’ period, between the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the founding of the Kaiserreich in 1871. It traces how he contributed to the construction of a common German legal order and, in the process, helped lay the foundations for the formation of international private law later in the century.

    Before joining Queen Mary I completed a BA in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin, and an MPhil and PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. From 2021 to 2023 I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College Cambridge.

  • Forschungsprojekt

    Corporate Rights and the Making of Legal Subjects in the German and British Empires, ca. 1870-1920

    This projects connects theoretical debates in nineteenth-century jurisprudence about the nature of legal personality with contemporaneous contestations of corporate rights in legal practice. Pluralism as an intellectual movement in Germany and Britain, exemplified above all by historically minded legal scholars from Otto von Gierke to Frederic Maitland and Harold Laski, questioned established conceptions of corporate rights as a ‘concession’ of the sovereign state. The project traces these debates into the interwar period, when a surge in nationalism amid decolonisation and economic protectionism politicised the possibility of corporate standing independent of sovereign consent. Based on court records, institutional and state archives, and contemporaneous legal scholarship it recovers a history of claim-making that includes multinational companies, national interests groups and international civil associations. In doing so, it aims to illustrate how and why legal systems facilitated collective agency across national boundaries, thus reimagining the history of the corporation as part of the history of democracy in an increasingly integrated world. 

  • Einschlägige Veröffentlichungen

    ‘Sovereignty and the Legal Legacies of Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Prussia’, open access in The Historical Journal, 64/4 (2021), pp. 963–987.

    ‘Law’s Histories in Post-Napoleonic Germany’, in John Robertson (ed.): Time, History and Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

    ‘Rechtsdruck in Preußen’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte (02/2023), pp. 36-40.