He received his PhD from the University of London, his MA from the National University of Ireland and his BA from the University of Connecticut. His research includes the suburbanization and the making of place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with a particular focus on Lower Merion, Pennsylvani. He also focuses on Irish migration in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on London and the middle classes as well as the famine and responses to distress in Ireland.