He read History as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford (Keble College). He completed his MA and PhD in History at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore under the primary supervision of Prof. Jack P. Greene. He was then a Visiting Assistant Professor at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania before moving to Korea in 2006 to participate in the establishment of an English medium Liberal Arts College (Underwood International College) within Yonsei University. He has previously held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2014, followed by a Visiting Research Fellow appointment at the History Department of King's College London (2014-2015) to work on a project entitled ‘Conceptualizations of East Asia and the Making of the Scottish Enlightenment: Histories of Global Power, 1688-1815.’