• Biography
• Research Interests
• Prizes
• Conference and Seminar Presentations

Ian recently joined ISA as an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow following the completion of his DPhil at the University of Oxford, where he was a Mellon Fund Research Assistant. He has held teaching posts at Oxford and the University of Reading. He holds Master’s degrees from the universities of Sussex and Essex, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Bristol.

Ian's work examines debates in the twentieth-century United States over how national progress should have been measured; as such it encompasses the place of experts in US politics; developments in social science; and the broad characteristics of American political culture and institutions. Ian is currently working on a project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council, to draw out the lessons for policy-makers today on both sides of the Atlantic of the history of these debates.

• Jan. 2008 Richard Neustadt Prize: given annually by the American Politics Group of the UK Political Studies Association for the best paper by a graduate student at the Group’s annual conference.

• Forthcoming, July 2011 ‘How the Cold War affected domestic policy under Eisenhower: evidence from the commissioning of 'Goals for Americans', UK Historians of the Twentieth Century United States Annual Conference, University of Oxford
• July 2010 ‘The politics of measuring progress in the Hoover and Johnson Administrations’, UK Historians of the Twentieth Century United States Annual Conference, University of Sussex
• June 2010 ‘The politics of measuring progress in the Hoover and Johnson Administrations’, Policy History Conference, Columbus, Ohio
• May 2009 ‘The Nixon Administration and “national growth policy”’, RAI Graduate Workshop, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford
• Dec. 2008 ‘How should we measure national progress?’, College Colloquia, St Cross College, University of Oxford
• Nov. 2008 ‘The struggle to reform Congress’s analytical capabilities in the 1970s’, RAI Graduate Workshop
• Nov. 2008 ‘The politics of measuring progress: The development of social reporting in the Johnson Administration’, Oxford Staff-Graduate Seminar in Economic and Social History, Nuffield College
• Jun. 2008 ‘The politics of measuring progress: The development of social reporting in the Johnson Administration’, UK Historians of the Twentieth Century United States Annual Conference, University of London
• Jan. 2008 ‘The Nixon Administration and the quest for “quality of life”’, American Politics Group Annual Conference, Institute for Advanced Study, University of London 
• Nov. 2005 ‘Roots of the 1960s “social indicators movement”’, Oxford Staff-Graduate Seminar in Economic and Social History, Nuffield College