I completed my BA in History at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, and I am currently studying Modern Imperial Britain in the History PhD program there.

Despite being a native Californian, I have been fascinated since childhood with the history of the British Empire. I expected that this general interest area would manifest itself in research projects or a dissertation on the history of the press in British India and in the Empire generally in the 19th century.

I took a class on writing histories of death and of the dead among the living with Professor Thomas Laqueur during my first semester of graduate studies. Contemplating research topics for this seminar led me to become interested in British military cemeteries around the world.

I wrote a research paper elaborating the way that following the First World War the British Imperial War Graves Commission inaugurated the inclusion of language about cemeteries in international treaties. The group created an unprecedented legal structure which established it would own forever all British military cemeteries with the remains of soldiers who died in battle, no matter in which country they were located.

My current research and my prospective dissertation involves broadening this topic to encompass British civilian cemeteries overseas in addition to the military ones. I am interested in how they were established and maintained as well as how they changed and how they stayed the same at the "end of Empire."