RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am an historian of early modern Britain, and have published extensively on the politics of seventeenth-century England. I have been particularly interested in the question of political culture—the circulation of news and the rise of a proto-revolutionary political public sphere; the emergence of popular politics and the nature of political agency; the nature of political violence; the interplay among early modern political, literary, musical and visual cultures; and the scandalous histories of the early Stuart court. In recent years, my interests have broadened and shifted. My latest book, The Isles, explores the entangled histories of the British and Irish archipelago from the Neolithic Age to the early Eighteenth Century. My current research project is a work of climate history, focusing on the environmental, social, cultural and political impact of the Little Ice Age in Early Modern Britain, c.1580-1720.
At Rutgers, I serve on the executive board of the Rutgers British Studies Center (which I directed from 2010-12 and from 2024-25), and as co-convener of the Early Modern Now working group at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. Since 2014, I have been one of the general editors of the “Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain” book series published by Manchester University Press.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT
Undergraduate
- 510:245 The Arts of Power: Ritual, Myth and Propaganda
- 510:248 Histories of the Little Ice Age
- 510:342 Reformation Britain: England, Scotland and Ireland, c.1450-1600
- 510:344 A Century of Revolution? England, Scotland and Ireland, c.1600-1720
- 510:346 The English Revolution, 1640-60
Graduate
- 510:597 Readings in Early Modern European History
- 510:603 Colloquium in Early Modern British History
MAJOR PUBLICATIONS
- The Isles: A New History of Britain and Ireland to 1750 (Oxford UP: New York, 2027).
- The Murder of King James I, (Yale UP: New Haven and London, 2015), co-written with Thomas Cogswell
- The Politics of Court Scandal In Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660, (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 2002).
- “Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources” (Early Modern Literary Studies: Text Series 1: 2005), www.earlystuartlibels.net, co-edited with Andrew McRae.