The Faculty
Professor John Morrill
Professor of British and Irish History
Cambridge CB3 9DQ
Biography:
John Morrill was educated at Altrincham Grammar School (Cheshire) and at Trinity College Oxford (BA 1967, DPhil 1971). He was a Research Fellow there (1970-4) and a Lecturer at Stirling University (1974-5) before moving to Cambridge in 1975 as Lecturer, Reader and now Professor. He has been a Fellow of Selwyn College since 1975 and was Director of Studies in History 1975-92, Tutor 1979-92, Admissions Tutor 1982-7, Senior Tutor 1987-92 and Vice Master 1992-2001. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and served as Vice President from 2001-9. He is also an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Academy of Finland, and he holds honorary degrees from several universities and is an Hon. Fellow of Trinity College Oxford and Trinity College Dublin. He is also a permanent deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and holds several senior positions in the Diocese of East Anglia (eg Chair of the Commission for Evangelisation and Assistant Director for Diaconal Formation) and he teaches Church History and pastoral theology one weekend a month at St John's Seminary, Wonersh.
Subject groups/Research projects
Departments and Institutes
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.
Key Publications
Representative examples of his recent work include:
- The Nature of the English Revolution (Longman, 1994)
- The British Problem 1534-1707 (with Brendan Bradshaw, 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)
- Firmly I Believe and Truly: the Catholic Spiritual Tradition in England 1483-2000 (with John Saward, Michael Tomko, OUP, 2011)
Other Publications
A complete list of 114 'major publications' between 1967 and 2009 can be found in a festschrift presented to John Morrill on his 65th birthday - eds. Michael J.Braddick and David L. Smith, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (CUP, 2011), pp.291-8, but there are already seven more publications, most prominently 'Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in crisis: 1652 revisited', Parliamentary History 30:2 (2011), 193-214; 'Renaming England's Wars of Religion' in eds.C.Prior and G.Burgess, England's Wars of Religion, Revisited (Ashgate, 2011), pp.307-26 and 'The causes of Penal Laws: paradoxes and inevitabilities' in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 26 (2011); 55-73