Professor John Morrill

Professor of British and Irish History

Selwyn College Cambridge CB3 9DQ Tel: (+44) (0)1223 335895 (or 335846) Fax: (+44) (0)1223 335837 jsm1000@hermes.cam.ac.uk

Professor Morrill has research interests across the period 1500-1750, and in many aspects of the period – religious, political, social and cultural. He has written more than a dozen articles in the past decade exploring the historical relationship between the peoples of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, most easily approached through his short book Uneasy Lies the head that wears a Crown: dynastic crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain 1504-1746 (2005) and in his Ford Lectures in Oxford in 2005, entitled Living with Revolution: the peoples of Britain and Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which he is preparing for publication.

He is also deeply concerned about the religious dynamics of early modern British History, and especially about the religious psychology of leading actors in the events of the period, most notably Oliver Cromwell as can be seen in his biography of Oliver Cromwell (2007) and in many papers including forthcoming essays on Cromwell and the Bible and on Cromwell’s massacre of the garrison of Drogheda.

He has been heavily involved in several major projects leading to electronic publications – he was the founding editor (1991-9) of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography Online, which itemises and indexes (a contents index not just a title index) nearly half a million books, articles and essays on the history of Britain, Ireland and the British Overseas (www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl); and he is currently one of three senior scholars managing the preparation of an edition of the 3,600 depositions of witnesses to the massacres in Ireland in 1641 funded by Research Councils in the UK and in Ireland. He has been the Consultant Editor for 6,000+ seventeenth-century lives in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Teaching

He has supervised more than 100 graduate students of sixteen nationalities, and his research supervision covers all the areas of his research, mainly but not exclusively in the seventeenth century. His current undergraduate teaching includes a Special Subject on The Irish Rebellion of 1641: origins, course, consequences.

Publications

Representative examples of his recent work include:

• The Nature of the English Revolution (Longman, 1994), (with Brendan Bradshaw)
• The British Problem 1534-1707 (Macmillan, 1996)
• The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Revolt in the Provinces: The English People and the Tragedies of War 1634-48 (Longman, 1999)
• Uneasy Lies the head that wears a Crown: dynastic crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain 1504-1746 (University of Reading Press: 2005)
• Oliver Cromwell (OUP, VIP series, 2007)