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....