Patrick graduated from the University of Exeter in 2016 with a First Class BA in English Literature and History. His undergraduate dissertation examined the role of palaeontology in American popular culture in the late 19th century, and the ways in which popular scientific texts constructed prehistoric America as a mythic wilderness, capable of filling the symbolic role previously filled by the rapidly vanishing western frontier. More broadly, his research interests include radical ideologies (communism, fascism and the dirtier edges of progressivism), the legitimacy and practices of totalitarian regimes, the history of science, and the history of any kind of mass incorrectness – superstition, urban legend, folk mythology or moral panic, from the Salem Witch Trials to the murder of David Hennessy to McCarthyism and beyond.
In his free time, Patrick plays drums and has been active in amateur theatre as both an actor and a writer.
