Born in north Belfast, I attended Holy Family Boys Primary School and St Malachy’s College. The latter can boast such varied ‘old boys’ as Martin O’Neill, Ciaran Hinds and Frank Carson!

I then took my undergraduate degree at the Queen’s University of Belfast, where I studied for Joint Honours Modern History and Byzantine Studies. After that, my continued studies saw me move to the University of York to take gain a MA in in Historical Research and then on to London, where I joined the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (part of UCL) for my PhD. Both of these degrees were funded by an AHRC scholarship.

My doctoral thesis, on the creation of a ‘public’ in St Petersburg in the early to mid eighteenth century, was initially supervised by Professor Roger Bartlett and, subsequent to his retirement in 2003, Professor Lindsey Hughes. I joined LSE as a teaching fellow in September 2004, having to combine teaching with the task of completing my thesis. Despite the best efforts of the England cricket team to distract me in summer 2005, it was completed on time and passed viva in December.