ABOUT

How does a Bronze Age historian end up working in sustainability?
It's less of a stretch than you'd expect. My PhD work focused on social structures and peer-to-peer interactions in Bronze Age China alongside comparative work with the Ancient Near East. I'd always aimed to have a public facing element to my work-- we talk a lot about science communication, but we also really need to work on humanities communication because we find that the ancient world wasn't so different from our own. While the majority of Social Network Analysis research focuses on the contemporary world and its institutions, those same tools can be applied to the ancient world and what we find is that issues of hierarchy and inequality are perennial. Seeing the mismanagement of Corona and the worsening climate crisis, I wanted to get directly involved. I've seen societies collapse over and over in the historical record, but I've also seen attempts to find a better future and if we are to survive, then we need to make the full use of the thousands of years of data that we have, be it the impact of Babylonian stock temple-corporations or the outcomes of rational self-interest-based policies in Early Imperial China. This site and blog are about my thoughts and work on sustainability; the systemic issues we face and potential solutions. I am still new to all of this, so any thoughts or feedback will be gratefully appreciated.

And yes. I really was that excited about icebergs.