Professor Alexandra Walsham

Alex is an Official Fellow and a Director of Studies in History. She is also Professor of Modern History at the University.

Biography

She was always drawn to History, though at University she also studied English, Maths and Chemistry! Born in Cornwall, and emigrating to Australia with her family as a child, Alex grew up mostly in Melbourne, but also spent a few years in Nevada and Arizona. She completed her BA and MA degrees at the University of Melbourne, before coming to Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar to study towards a PhD at Trinity College. She was a Research Fellow at Emmanuel between 1993–1996 and then taught for 16 years at the University of Exeter, becoming a Professor and Head of the History Department between 2007–2010. In 2010 she returned to Cambridge to the established Professorship of Modern History, and served as Chair of the Faculty of History between 2019–2022. She has also held visiting fellowships in the UK, Germany, Australia and the United States. Outside of her University work, she enjoys gardening and walking.

Teaching

Emmanuel has a strong, cohesive and friendly group of historians at all levels: Fellows, Research Fellows, graduates and undergraduates. Alex supervises for the first–year paper on Early Modern Britain, and convenes the second year Topic paper ‘Faith, Fire and Fury: The British Reformations and their Discontents’ and a third year Special Subject on 'Memory in Early Modern England'. She also currently directs the MPhil in Early Modern History.

Research

Alex's research interests centre on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain, especially the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. She has published on a range of themes, including religious tolerance and intolerance; providence, miracles and the supernatural; the interconnections between oral, visual and print culture; landscape; material culture; and memory. Her most recent book is Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (OUP, 2023), which derives from the Ford Lectures in British History delivered at the University of Oxford in 2018. In 2024 she delivered the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast on the theme ‘The Persecution of the Tongue: Speech, Silence, and Religious Coexistence in Early Modern England’. Her research has been funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust. Alex was also Principal Investigator of the AHRC project, 'Remembering the Reformation' (2016–19).