I’m Robert. I work in research, design, teaching and web development. That might seem a varied set of skills, but I think most of the time they’re about communicating clearly with other people. I’ve published a coffeehouse culture magazine in San Diego, managed a new media group building interactive textbooks for McGraw-Hill Education, and spent several years at a California advertising agency. After moving to Oxford, I spent fifteen years teaching, mostly photography and graphic design, whilst also holding academic and pastoral leadership roles.

Outside work, I read and study history, and especially 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 specialised in 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 the game of tarot. Most recently, I built a website exploring the history of England’s cunning folk, the village healers and service magicians, and explored the questions of place, belief and being in A Codex of Indwelling Spirits.