Research, design, and teaching in Oxford.
I’m Robert. I started out publishing a coffeehouse culture magazine in San Diego, managed a new media group for McGraw-Hill Education in the early years of the web, worked at a trendy ad agency and then came to Oxford, where I taught for fifteen years, mostly photography and graphic design.
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. I studied the religious history of Oxford, from the Anglo-Saxon minster to the Oxford Movement, for my diploma, and world religions and classical mythology for my BA. I also 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.
Whatever the subject, once I’ve found something I love, I want to share it, clearly and in a form that’s good to look at. That is what the teaching, the design, the photography and the websites have in common.
Timeline
Just the highlights, full CV available here.
- 1993Founded Blend Magazine, San Diego
- 1995New Media Manager, McGraw-Hill Education
- 2003Web Project Manager, The Lambesis Agency, where I led the in-house SEO
- 2006Founded tarothistory.com; the forum followed in 2008
- 2010Diploma in English Local History, University of Oxford
- 2010Oxford Sixth Form College. Fifteen years teaching: English, then Photography, with roles as Head of International Students and Senior Tutor
- 2014BA (Hons) Humanities with Religious Studies, The Open University
- 2022Proposed, introduced and taught a new A-Level in Graphic Communication
- 2025Design and product work for Vizaeo, an answer engine optimisation platform
- 2026The Cunning Folk Cards and Spiritus Loci projects
I’m looking for a role in Oxford where I can research, write, design or teach for an organisation whose subject I care about.
Robert
Personal Projects
Work made without a commission.
Cunning Folk Cards
An interactive history of England’s cunning folk, the village healers and charmers people consulted for three centuries. It tells the stories of twelve documented practitioners from court records, pamphlets and their own casebooks, with a 54-card deck, an annotated reading list, and interactive tools for exploring it.
The research is organised in an Obsidian vault linked to Zotero, holding 210 sources. A written verification rule governs the content: every claim on the site traces back to a passage I have read directly in the source. Research, writing, design and build.
Tarot History
A research site I founded in 2006 on the history of tarot as a card game: its origins in fifteenth-century northern Italy, its spread across Europe, and its later adoption for divination. The forum, running since 2008, holds more than 24,000 posts across 1,300 topics from beginners, enthusiasts and scholars around the world.
My own contribution to the field is comparative iconography. I set cards from different decks side by side and compare small details to work out which versions came first and how the designs descended from one another.
Spiritus Loci
An experiential investigation into the spirit of place and into personhood: the old idea that a doorstep, a hearth or a well can be someone. The codex moves through six attendant spirits, field notes, a little book of hours and a chant for Hildegard of Bingen, and closes with twenty-four photographs from the scrapbook.
Design, writing, photography and build. All photographs are my own, taken on Fujifilm cameras. Generative tools helped with the code, some of the text, the sung voice and the background animation, and each one is credited in the colophon.
Field Notes
Notes from churches, villages and old places around Oxford.
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Wall Paintings in Shorthampton
A few miles outside Charlbury, down a lane that gives no warning of what’s at the end of it, sits the chapel of All Saints, Shorthampton. It is easy to miss, and that is rather the point. Shorthampton was built…
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Highgate Cemetery
Many years ago whilst living in San Francisco, I found a book from the 1980s called “Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla”, The book was filled with photos of what appeared to be a completely overgrown, if not somewhat abandoned cemetery in…
