He received his BA and MA from the University of Warwick in England before moving to the University of California Riverside for his doctoral work. He has been a Rockefeller fellow at Colonial Williamsburg, the recipient of a NEH summer fellowship and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His research looks at the role that spatial understanding, both mental and physical, played during colonialism. Specifically he examines interaction between the Cherokee and British Nations in the American southeast in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. He is also the person who brought pirates to UI with his upper division course on the history of Piracy.