My core research is concerned with the role played by violence in the shaping of early American society and its role in the creation Native American ‘Otherness’.

As a historian, I am particularly interested in violence as a formative source – rather than a cumulative effect produced by other social or economic forces, I instead prefer to study violence as a starting point for new event-chains.  This has led to me develop a particular interest in the transmission of ideas and war-traumas from one generation to the next, and the specific mechanism which allow conflict-experience to be canonised, reproduced, passed-on, and, in some cases, commercialised.