Welcome!

This blog takes you behind the scenes of the writing of an academic history book – like a ‘making of’ featurette. Its aim is to make visible the traditionally invisible process of what it’s like for a university academic in the Humanities to write a research monograph, i.e. a single-authored 100,00 word book.

I’m a History Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and the book I’m writing has a working title of The Elusive Church: Luther, Poland and the Early Reformation. This project is supported by a British Academy Mid Career Fellowship (2012-13).

On these pages, you'll find a regular 'log' of how the book is progressing, plus information about the project. I welcome your comments and thoughts - whether you're studying or teaching history at school or university, or writing non-fiction yourself...

Monday, 1 October 2012

365 Days


Today is the official start date of the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship which will enable me to spend the next 12 months completing the manuscript of the Elusive Church monograph. My temporary replacement at Somerville, the historian of early modern science, Dr. Alex Wragge-Morley, has arrived in Oxford and is settling into college.

It’s an enormous privilege to be in receipt of an award like this – with it comes excitement but also a keen feeling of responsibility (akin to that which I felt when taking up my British Academy-funded Masters studentship in 1998, and my Arts & Humanities Research Board-funded doctoral place in 2000). I now have to produce a book worthy of the investment of public research funds, and which also merits the British Academy’s faith in the idea of a new monograph on the early Polish Reformation....

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