He teaches British and Scottish history, lecturing on a wide range of subjects including British Imperialism, Scottish cultural, social, and intellectual history from the fifteenth century to the present, and the Scottish Enlightenment. A former Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, he has written extensively on Scottish Freemasonry and eighteenth-century Scottish clubs and societies. His latest book, The Great Transformation: Scottish Freemasonry 1725-1810 (Westphalia, 2018), examines the changing nature of Scottish Freemasonry in its wider British and European contexts during the eighteenth century.