Will is the Academic Tutor for first year undergraduates at the Department of Geography and Environment. Will has taught in the Department since 2022, and now teaches several courses at both undergraduate and graduate level.
Will’s main teaching focus involves facilitating the first-year undergraduate academic experience. As well as teaching GY100, he supports first years as their academic mentor, and through a series of workshops he runs that aims at developing their academic skills.
Will is engaged in several research projects in the areas of political economy and the politics of place. His main research focus is on the relationship between state development and nationalism over the long run. He analyses centuries-old documents to unpick how novel technologies like newspapers and infrastructures mediated peoples’ nationalised relationships with their state. For example, his PhD thesis analysed hundreds of popular documents produced in England during the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) that used discourses of nationalism to justify the growth of the state.
Currently, Will is writing a series of papers that focus on how interactions with foreign Others were used to articulate ideas of nationhood in 18th century Great Britain.