Dr Carys Brown

Head of Academic, Personal, and Professional Development, Trinity College
Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of History
Image
I am currently Head of Academic, Personal, and Professional Development at Trinity College, as well as an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History. Prior to this, I was a Research Fellow at Trinity College. I previously worked as a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project 'Faith in the Town: Lay Religion, Urbanisation and Industrialisation in England, 1740-1830' at the University of Manchester. My other roles have included Bye-Fellow in Study Skills at Girton College, Cambridge, and History teacher at Saffron Walden County High School. I hold a BA, PGCE, MPhil, and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.
My primary research interests are in the social, cultural, and religious history of late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain, and in particular in the social history of religious tolerance and the education and upbringing of children.

My monograph, 'Friends, Neighbours, Sinners: Religious Difference and English Society, 1689-1750', argues that religious difference was a formative principle of eighteenth-century English society. Focusing on how individuals and groups managed the tensions created by religious difference in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, a period of considerable religious and political tension, it shows how this influenced wider social and cultural developments across the period.

I am currently working on a new project on children and play in England in the period c.1660-1780, which will explore the relationship between children's play and social exclusion on the basis of status, gender, or religion.
I teach Part 1A Outline Papers O4 (Early Modern Britain) and O6 (Global Eighteenth Century). I also convene a Sources paper on Children and Childhood in Early Modern England.
 
I welcome enquiries from students seeking to write dissertations on aspects of British social, cultural, and religious history, c. 1660-1800.
I am a member of the AHRC-funded research network 'Anti-Catholicism in British history, 1520-1900', based at Newcastle University.

Contact

Tags & Themes

Address

Trinity College

Email
clmb3@cam.ac.uk
Links

Key publications

Monographs
 
Hannah Barker, Carys Brown, Kate Gibson, and Jeremy Gregory, Faith in the Town: Lay Religion in Northern England, 1740–1830 (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).
 
 
Articles
 
'Sound Faith: Religion and the Aural Environment of Towns in Northern England, ca. 1740-1830', Cultural & Social History, 18 (2021), pp. 463-80 (https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2021.1940625).
 
'Politeness, Hypocrisy, and Protestant Dissent in England after the Toleration Act, c. 1689 - c. 1750', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41 (2018), pp. 61-80 (https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12521).

'Catholic Politics and Creating Trust in Eighteenth-Century England', British Catholic History, 33 (2017), pp. 622-44 (https://doi.org/10.1017/bch.2017.28).

'Militant Catholicism, Inter-Confessional Relations, and the Rookwood Family of Stanningfield, Suffolk, c.1689-c.1737', The Historical Journal, 60 (2017), pp. 21-45 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X15000503).
 
 
Book Chapters
 
'Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766', in Liam Chambers, ed., The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746-1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) (https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0002).
 
'Women and Religious Coexistence in England, c. 1689-c.1750' in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods, eds., Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1550-1750 (Routledge, 2021) (https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429322631).
 
'Everyday Anti-Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-Century England' in Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan, eds., Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600-2000: Practices, Representations and Ideas (Palgrave, 2020) (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42882-2_4).

 

Edited Volumes
 
Marietta D.C. van der Tol, Carys Brown, John Adenitire, and Emily S. Kempson, eds., From Toleration to Religious Freedom: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2021) (https://doi.org/10.3726/b17979).