Welcome to my site.

Hi, I’m Robert. Early in my career, I published a coffeehouse culture magazine in San Diego, managed a new media group for McGraw-Hill Education during the web’s early days, and spent several years at a popular California ad agency. After moving to Oxford, I spent fifteen years teaching, mostly photography and graphic design, and also held a series of academic and pastoral leadership roles.

Alongside all of that, I’ve always been drawn to history, and especially to the history of belief: how it begins, how it changes, and how it shapes the people and places that hold it. For my Diploma in English Local History, I studied the religious institutions of Oxford, from the Anglo-Saxon minster to the Oxford Movement, and then expanded into world religions and classical mythology for my BA. I can’t leave a historical puzzle alone, which is how I came to spend twenty years on the history of tarot. Most recently, I built a history of England’s village healers from their court records and casebooks, and explored the same questions of place and belief in Spiritus Loci.

Whatever the subject, once I’ve found something I love, I want to share it, clearly and in a form that’s (hopefully) nice to look at. That is what the research, the design, the teaching and the websites have in common.