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About Me

I am a social and cultural historian of modern Britain and Europe, with particular expertise in the history of labour, gender and sexuality, imperialism and colonialism, and the digital humanities. I am about to finish my PhD in History at the University of Toronto.

My PhD dissertation, titled Precarious Desire: Gender, Intimacy, and Companionship in Working-Class London, 1880-1914, examines how underemployed home-workers, striking factory workers, sex workers, and local suffrage activists formed intimate attachments as they navigated poverty and chronic insecurity. Drawing from methods in social history, feminist and queer studies, visual culture, and the history of emotions, my research captures a broad range of stories about everyday life and love in modern Britain.

My PhD also includes an open-access digital mapping project exploring the social networks of commercial sex in London’s West End. You can see my StoryMap here.

My future research will explore intimate histories of suicide, focusing on the ways that gender, class, and disability were entangled in contemporary understandings of suicidality in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

I also have plenty of experience teaching undergraduates in history, and am particularly interested in applying innovative, accessible pedagogies. Most recently, I TA’d a course on the history of social media and AI, where I got to chat with students about histories of capitalism, the emergence of modern computing, and TikTok algorithms. I have worked as a TA for nearly a dozen other undergraduate courses crossing thematic and geographic boundaries, too.

Currently, I am teaching a third-year course in women’s history at the University of Toronto Mississauga. In Fall 2022, I designed and taught my first course on the history of gender and sexuality in Europe and its empires across the long nineteenth century. We covered topics ranging from work and the family to the regulation of sex and the entangled histories of sex, race, science, and empire.

I hold an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from McGill University.

Recent Publications

Sartore, Nastasha. “Reviewed Work: The Social Cost of Cheap Food: Labour and the Political Economy of Food Distribution in Britain, 1830-1914 by Sébastien Rioux.” Labour/Le Travail 85 (2020).

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Britain

Expertise by Geography

Atlantic, British Isles, England, United Kingdom, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, Modern, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Family, Gender, Labor, Law, Material Culture, Museums, Pedagogy, Politics, Public History, Science, Sexuality, Sexual Violence, Urban History, Women