Advisory Board

  • Dominik Collet
  • Christopher Dyer
  • Oscar Gelderblom
  • Paul Halstead
  • Julian Hoppit
  • Mary Lindemann
  • Cathy Shrank
  • Paul Slack
  • Richard Smith
  • Jan de Vries 
  • John Walter
  • Phil Withington
  • Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

Dominik Collet is professor for Environmental History at the University of Oslo. He works in the fields of climate history, the history of disasters and the global history of things. His research focuses on the historical entanglements of nature and culture both in their mental and in their material configurations. Dominik’s most recent book explores the interaction of climate and culture during the European famine of 1770-1772. He is currently heading an interdisciplinary research project ClimateCultures – the Little Ice Age in the Nordics (1500-1800).”

Christopher Dyer: BA and PhD at Birmingham Univ; Assistant Lecturer at Edinburgh Univ 1967-70; Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, Professor at Birmingham Univ 1970-2001. Professor at Leicester 2001-10. Author of   Making a Living in the Middle Ages: the People of Britain c. 850-1520  (New Haven,2002);  An Age of Transition?  Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005); A Country Merchant: 1495-1520.   Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2012);  Peasants Making History. Living in an English Region 1200-1540 (Oxford, 2022).  Now working on a book on villages.

Oscar Gelderblom (1971) is a professor of economic and social history at Antwerp University since 2021. He has a special interest in the history of trade and finance. He has published on the organization of long-distance trade in early modern Europe, on financial markets, entrepreneurship, migration and political economy. He currently works on historical household finance in the 19th and 20th century, on the early history of the Dutch East India Company, and on the financial development of the Low Countries before the Industrial Revolution.

Paul Halstead is an Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the University of Sheffield. His research interests lie in the archaeology of early farming systems and political economies of later prehistoric-early historic Europe and in the ethnographic/oral-historical investigation of ‘traditional’ pre-mechanised food production in Mediterranean Europe.

Julian Hoppit is Emeritus Professor of British History at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy. He researches British and sometimes British and Irish history, focussing upon economic history and the history of political economy in practice, mainly in the period 1660-1830. Among his publications are: Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700-1800 (1987); A Land of Liberty? England, 1689-1727 (2000); Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660-1800 (2017); and The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations: Taxing, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021 (2021). 

Mary Lindemann is Emerita Professor of History at the University of Miami.  She has published a number of books and articles on early modern German history and the history of medicine, most recently The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648-1790 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She is working on a history of Brandenburg in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. It is tentatively titled “Fractured Lands: War and Its Aftermath in Brandenburg, 1627-1721.” She is currently writing an article on the wars of the mid to late seventeenth century for a French publication on “Coming Out of War.”

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield, and works on canonical and non-canonical writings from the late fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. Publications include Writing the Nation in Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2004), the co-edited collection The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), and – with Raphael Lyne – an edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (Routledge, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph on dialogue (supported by a major Leverhulme Research Fellowship), editing William Tyndale’s Mammon, and collaborating on the Oxford Works of Thomas Nashe.

Paul Slack is an Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Social History at Oxford University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications chiefly relate to the economic and social history of Britain between the 15th and the 18th centuries, and include Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman, 1988), From Reformation to Improvement: public welfare in early modern England (Oxford UP, 1999), and The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford UP, 2015), as well as The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford UP, 1985). Relevant papers include, ‘Material Progress and the Challenge of Affluence in l7th Century England’, Economic History Review, 62, (2009), pp. 576-603, and ‘The Politics of English Political Economy in the 1620s’, in M.J.Braddick and P.Withington, eds., Popular Culture and Political Agency…essays in honour of John Walter (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2017), pp. 55-72.

Richard Smith is Emeritus Professor of Historical Geography and Demography University of Cambridge and formerly Director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and the President of the UK Economic History Society. He has published widely on the relations between demographic, economic and social changes in the later middle ages and the early modern period. He has a particular interest in the development of welfare provision over these two periods and particularly in the efficacy of the English poor law system in delivering assistance to the labouring poor with consequences for their living standards and health.

Jan de Vries is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of History and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a BA from Columbia University and PhD from Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the  Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW).  He has published widely in European economic history with special reference to the Dutch Republic and the early modern period.  Recent publications include: The Price of Bread: Regulating the Market in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019); “Playing with scales: the global and the micro; the macro and the nano,” Past and Present Supplement 14 Global History and Micro History (2019), 23-36; “On the Road.  Poor travelers in mid-seventeenth century Friesland,” Journal of interdisciplinary History 52 (2022), 477-511.

John Walter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Essex.  He researches and publishes widely across the economic, social, cultural and political history of early modern Britain and Ireland. He has published widely on popular political culture and early modern protest. In particular, he has worked on early modern famine, crowds and the politics of subsistence.  

Phil Withington is professor of social and cultural history at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively in three areas of early modern history. These include urban culture and urbanization, the intersections between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture, and the history of intoxicants and intoxication. He has been an ESRC Mid-Career Research Fellow and run two major funded projects during the last decade: on ‘Intoxicants and Early Modernity’ (funded by the ESRC/AHRC: https://www.intoxicantsproject.org) and ‘Intoxicating Spaces’ (funded by HERA: https://www.intoxicatingspaces.org). He is currently writing a monograph provisionally titled The Holy Herb and Other Stories. Worlds of Intoxicants in Early Modern England.

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, is associate professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently the PI of the NWO VIDI research project on premodern conflict management (premodernconflictmanagement.org) and has published widely on social, economic, political and cultural history of northern Europe, in particular of the Hanse area. She works at the intersection of history and social sciences in the topics of trust and conflict management. Her recent publications are a contribution to the forthcoming Cambridge Urban History of Europe and together with Stuart Jenks, Message in a Bottle Merchants’ letters, merchants’ marks and conflict management in 1533-34. A source edition(Brepols 2022). In connection to this edition, she has designed a pilot study of merchants’ marks.