Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

I was educated at the university of Liverpool where I completed a PhD on ‘Politics, society and civil war in Warwickshire’. I have worked at the Open University and then as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Manchester University. I have been at Keele since September 1995.

I am a historian of early modern England with particular interests in the culture, religion and politics of the English civil war – or English Revolution as I would prefer to call it.  In recent years my interests have included religious debate and polemic, print culture, gender and radicalism. I am completing a book Women, Men and Politics in the English Revolution for Routledge and working on articles on Presbyterian publishing and the reception of preaching in revolutionary London.

I am committed to interdisciplinary approaches and have gained much from working with the literary scholars Julie Sanders (Nottingham) on gender and royalism, and with Tom Corns (Bangor) and David Loewenstein (Madison) on the radical writer Gerrard Winstanley. Our edition of Winstanley’s Complete Works (the first ever) was published by Oxford University Press in December 2009.

Level 1:

• HIS 10024: Early Medieval Britain
• HIS 10030: Historical Research and Writing
• HIS 10027: Early Modern Europe
• HIS 10026: History, Media, Memory

Level 2

• HIS 20028: State and Empire
• HIS 20048: Protest, Rebellion and Revolution 1530-1640.

Level 3:

• HIS 30062-3: Women in Early Modern England: Representations and Life-writings.

I also teach on ‘Approaches to Historical Research’ and ‘Reflective Practice’ for our masters’ programmes.