Kirsty studied for her BA in English at St. Anne's College, Oxford, graduating in 2006, and completed her MA in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at Queen Mary in 2009. She started a Queen Mary-funded PhD in September 2009, working on Volume I of The Letters of a Stuart Princess, the CELL project to produce the definitive edition of the letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

Kirsty's research takes its cue from Salomon de Caus's spectacular volume of engravings showing the gardens at Elizabeth's married home at Heidelberg, and focuses on the the means by which depictions of seemingly 'recreational' spaces such as gardens were produced and circulated in the early seventeenth century.