Professor of Early Modern History

Contact Details

Biography

I am Professor of Early Modern History, with a particular interest in the rich and complex history of Protestantism in Britain and America. I read History at Cambridge and did my PhD (on the Scottish Covenanter, Samuel Rutherford) at Churchill College, where I became a Junior Research Fellow in 1994. After a year as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London in 1998-99, I moved to the School of Historical Studies. Since coming to Leicester, I have published on various aspects of early modern Protestant culture: toleration debates, the English Revolution, Puritanism, Evangelicalism, and antislavery. I am currently completing a book on the political use of the Exodus story from Calvin to Martin Luther King, and am part of a team working to produce a five-volume critical edition of a major seventeenth-century memoir, Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). 

Research

• Research Interests 
• Publications

PhD Supervision

Religion, politics and ideas in early modern Britain and America. I am especially interested in the English Revolution, Puritanism and Dissent, Evangelicalism, toleration debates, and the Protestant reception of Enlightenment thought. I very much welcome enquiries from anyone keen to do research in these fields. My past and present PhD students have worked on Scottish Covenanters, English Presbyterians and Independents, Restoration Dissent, and the political use of the Bible during the Puritan Revolution.

Teaching

I have taught a wide range of undergraduate courses: Early Modern Europe, The Stuart Age, The English Revolution, Anglo-American Puritanism, Persecution and Toleration from Reformation to Enlightenment, Indians & English in Seventeenth-Century New England, London in the Age of Pepys, Church and State in Early America, and Religion in America 1600-2000. I am willing to supervise dissertations on politics, religion and ideas in early modern Britain and America.

Administrative Responsibilities

Chair of the Postgraduate Committee
Member of the External Relations Committee 

Most Recent Publications

1. (co- editor with A. Chapman and B. Gregory) Seeing Things their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) 
2. (co-editor with P. C. H. Lim)The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
3. John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Boydell and Brewer, 2006) Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Longman, 2000)
4. Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge University Press, 1997)