History & joint degrees

I joined Oxford in 2006, having spent 13 years at the University of Dundee where I held a personal chair in British history.

My research interests are quite diverse, but focus on the political, cultural and social history of Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century. My early work was on the rise of the newspaper press and the relationships between print culture and politics. This led me to a broader interest in the political culture of the British Isles in the central decades of the eighteenth century. My published work on these themes includes the books Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France 1600-1800 (1996) and Politics and the Nation: Britain in the mid eighteenth century (2002). Whilst in Scotland, I developed a keen interest in Scottish history, notably the impact of the French revolution on Scottish politics and society, and on British political economy in the eighteenth century. My work on this includes the book The Scottish People and the French Revolution (2008). More recently, I have been interested in the growth and development of provincial Scottish towns in the later Georgian period, and the impact and diffusion of enlightenment culture and values. In 2014 the results of this work were published in The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1740-1820, which won the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year prize for 2014.  My most recent book is a thematic biography of the radical aristocrat, Lord Daer entitled A Tale of Three Cities: The Life and Times of Lord Daer, 1763-1794 (2015). I am now working on a project on gambling and attitudes towards risk in Britain and the British empire between c.1660 and 1850.

View all publications on the Faculty of History website

I work on the religious and social history of western Europe and North Africa, from the fall of Rome to the rise of Latin Christendom after the first millennium. I have studied the problem of moral authority in the post-Roman West. My current project traces the relationship between institutional identity and cultural memory across the late ancient and early medieval period.  In a study entitled The Myth of the Church, I plan to follow the development–slow and late–of a professional, celibate clerical hierarchy.

My immediate interests are in proposing a new view of the tenth-century Church. I am testing the hypothesis that this was an era in which bishops took advantage of the confusion occasioned by the end of the Carolingian Empire to achieve an unprecedented degree of institutional autonomy and self-definition. By marshalling (and sometimes actively forging) the authority of the early Church, late ninth- and tenth-century clerics succeeded in making of the episcopacy a career, with its own code of conduct, and the possibility of advancement.

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I work on Mediterranean history and archaeology, with particular interests in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, the Phoenicians, and ancient North Africa. I’ve published articles on topics from Roman imperialism to Athenian sculpture to Numidian architecture to Edwardian education, and I’ve co-edited volumes of essays on ‘The Hellenistic West’ (with Jonathan Prag) and ‘The Punic Mediterranean’ (with Nicholas Vella), as well as the collected articles of the late Peter Derow (with Andrew Erskine). My book In Search of the Phoenicians was published by Princeton University Press in January 2018. My latest book, How the World Made the West, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2024.

I teach a range of ancient history and archaeology papers at the undergraduate level, and I am currently supervising doctoral students working on feigned madness, sex scandals, and ancient Bactria.

View all publications on the Faculty of Classics website

I am a scholar of the political, religious and intellectual life of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England. My first monograph explored the interface between politics and ideas in sixteenth-century England by examining the impact of the career of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex on late Elizabethan political culture. My current research is centred on the relationship between the religious and constitutional history of the Reformation in the British Isles: I am writing a history of Parliament and the Reformation in sixteenth century England and Wales, and various articles on the relationship of church and state in the sixteenth century.

My research also focuses on early modern historiography and historical thought, and I am engaged in a series of studies of William Camden’s Annals of the Reign of Elizabeth I, the first history of Queen Elizabeth, which continues to shape the narrative of the Queen’s reign to this day. With Henry Woudhuysen, I am editing the letters of the poet and statesman Fulke Greville for the forthcoming edition of Greville’s Complete Works for OUP.

I am currently working on two main projects: the first addresses ideas about the antiquity and authority of Parliament as expressed in polemical debates about the legitimacy of the Protestant Church; the second is a study of travel and the political education of English gentlemen in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. I am also interested in ideas of statecraft and reason of state in Elizabethan and Jacobean politics.

View all publications on the Faculty of History website