Richard’s interests are in the interaction of social and economic change with political conflict in early modern Britain.
He is currently completing a project on the history of imprisonment in early modern England, exploring how straining credit networks, swelling inmate populations and political upheaval reshaped early modern prisons and their social worlds, and the political resonances this had within and beyond the prison walls.
He has also worked on religious radicalism during the English Revolution and on the Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England project at the University of Birmingham. In addition, he is developing a new project exploring everyday experiences of the early modern state, based on testimony from across the social spectrum, and ways in which they shaped popular political consciousness.