My archaeological career began at the University of Birmingham, where I obtained my bachelors degree in archaeology in 2008. I remained at Birmingham to study for an MPhil in archaeological practice, which I completed in 2010. During this time I also worked for two commercial archaeology units on a full-time basis, participating in excavations across the midlands and the south east of England. In November 2010 I enrolled at the University of Aberdeen to study for a PhD in Archaeology, which I initially undertook from Herefordshire before moving to London. My thesis considered the evidence for conflict in Viking Age England, focusing specifically on the area colonised and occupied by the Scandinavians during the 9^th and 10^th centuries (an area referred to by some scholars as the ‘Danelaw’).

Between February 2014 and December 2016 I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Human Evolutionary Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and I was lucky enough to spend two years living and working in Vancouver. In 2017, I returned to Europe in order to take up a position as a researcher at Uppsala University, where I was mainly engaged in conducting research on slavery in Viking-Age Scandinavia and early medieval Europe as part of the Swedish Research Council-funded project, The Viking Phenomenon. This work, which is currently being written up for publication, adopts a comparative, global perspective on the institution of slavery. During this period I spent considerable time abroad conducting research as a Matariki exchange fellow at Dartmouth College, a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, and a visiting research fellow at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies (University of Iceland). I was awarded my docentur/associate professor status in 2021.

In 2022, I was awarded a 6.1m SEK grant from the Swedish Research Council to lead the project Social Inequality, Structural Violence, and Marginalisation in Viking-Age Scandinavia (2022-25). The goal of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-proxy framework for the identification and study of social inequality among Scandinavian communities during the Viking Age. Drawing on sociologist Johan Galtung’s concept of ‘structural violence,’ the project has developed a framework that combines the bioarchaeological study of Viking-Age cemetery communities with more traditional archaeological approaches to the study of burial assemblages and contexts.

At present, I am also one of four project partners on the NordForsk-funded project Making a Warrior: The Social Implications of Viking Age Martial Ideologies (2023-26). The project, which involves partners based at research institutions in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland, aims to critically appraise and redefine the concept of warriorhood in Late Iron/Viking-Age Scandinavia.