British History in the 17th Century
Supported by the Conrad & Elizabeth Russell Fund
The seminar is one of the UK’s leading centres for the dissemination and discussion of the latest research on 17th century British and Irish history.

- Venue
- Hybrid | Online-via Zoom & Wolfson NB01, IHR
- Time
- Thursdays, 17:30
- Convenors
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Alex Barber is Assistant Professor in early modern history at Durham. He focuses particularly on the transmission of ideas and he is currently finishing a monograph, based on his PhD thesis, on information and communication in England, 1694-1721.
Joel Halcomb is Lecturer in early modern history at the University of East Anglia. He works on religious cultures in the civil war era and recently co-edited (with Michael Davies and Anne Dunan-Page), Church Life: Pastors, congregations, and the experience of dissent in seventeenth-century England (OUP, 2019)
Ariel Hessayon is Reader in early modern History at Goldsmiths. He specialises in the history of ideas and has published widely on radical religion, including a recent edited collection, The Refiner’s Fire: The Collected Works of TheaurauJohn Tany (London, 2018).
Ed Legon lectures in Heritage Management at Queen Mary and researches on memory, political culture, and the experience of work. His first book, recently published, is Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars (Manchester, 2019).
Jason Peacey is Professor of British History at UCL. He is the author of many books and articles on politics and print culture, especially in the civil war era, including Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). His current project is a microstudy of a protracted land dispute that sheds new light on the intersections between legal practices and politics in early modern England.
Joan Redmond is Lecturer in early modern British history at KCL. She has published on memory and violence and is currently writing a book, based on her PhD thesis, about sectarian violence in Ireland between 1641 and 1660.
Tim Reinke-Williams is Senior Lecturer in history, University of Northampton. He is an economic, social, and cultural historian with a particular interest in gender. His first book was entitled Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (Basingstoke, 2014) and he is now working on early modern attitudes to men’s bodies.
Laura Stewart is Professor of early modern British history and Head of the Department of History, University of York. Her recent work includes Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637-51 (Oxford, 2016; pbk 2018) and Union and Revolution: Scotland and Beyond, 1625-1745, co-authored with Janay Nugent, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in December 2020.
Charlotte Parsonson-Young is a tutor in early modern history and genealogy with the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. She is also a lecturer in History at Wake Forest University's London campus, and the Vice-Chair of the Cromwell Association. She primarily works on English Civil War sequestration and the career of John Bradshawe.
About the seminar
Please check our regular email notifications as we continue with the virtual seminar in 2020. For further information, please contact Charlotte Parsonson-Young: 17thcenturyseminar@gmail.com
The seminar is one of the UK’s leading centres for the dissemination and discussion of the latest research on 17th century British and Irish history. We cover all aspects of British and Irish political history, including but not restricted to print and manuscript circulation, British and transnational communication networks, parliament and political institutions, political and religious ideas, urban political culture, politics and memory, migrant communities in Britain, and British migrant and exile communities overseas.
Advance Notice: Conference, June 2025
Hosted by the British History in the 17th Century seminar. Supported by the Conrad and Elizabeth Russell Fund and the Department of History at the University of York.
Corruption and Scandal in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800
Dates: Thursday, 5 and Friday, 6 June 2025
Organisers: Amilia Gillies (Kent), Antonio Pattori (Oxford), and Florence Eccleston (Courtauld)
Confirmed participants:
- Alastair Bellany (Rutgers)
- David Chan Smith (Wilfrid Laurier)
- Elizabeth S. Cohen (York University, Toronto)
- Kenneth Fincham (Kent); Alexandra Gajda (Oxford)
- Mark Knights (Warwick)
- Peter Lake (Vanderbilt)
- Rupali Mishra (Auburn University)
- Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt)
- Kendra Packham (University of London)
- Ellen Patterson (Oxford)
- Casey S. Schmitt (Cornell)