Evangelical History-Writing and the Construction of Identity, 1735-1810

I am an historian of Christianity and of the early modern British Atlantic world. In my undergraduate and two postgraduate courses of study, I focused on different aspects of Protestant history: successively, the radical Reformation (B.A., University of Calgary), Canadian Christian university student groups in the 1920s and 1930s (M.A., Queen’s University, Canada), and, finally, eighteenth-century evangelicalism (Ph.D., University of St Andrews, completed in 2009). My current research stems from my doctoral work, concerning early evangelicalism within an eighteenth-century British North Atlantic context, and, more specifically, evangelical interpretations of church history. In recent years, I have extended my analysis of several historical sources on which my dissertation focused, specifically in regard to how the authors bowdlerized or otherwise edited their source material. I have published an article on John Wesley’s church historical writing (Studies in Church History, vol. 44, 2008), and I have given a variety of paper presentations, later published as conference proceedings, on eighteenth-century church histories by evangelicals, and on eighteenth-century church historiography in the English-speaking Atlantic world. This past spring, I published an article which analyzed Jonathan Edwards’s use, in his History of the Work of Redemption, of historical works by Church of Scotland clergyman Robert Millar. Currently I am commencing a study of a multi-volume work entitled Biographia Evangelica, written by evangelical Calvinist and Anglican clergyman Erasmus Middleton and published between 1779 and 1786-the results of which will comprise a chapter in the forthcoming Ashgate volume Evangelicalism and its Historians (eds. Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones, Studies in Evangelicalism series). Since 2008, I have been employed in Alberta and Ontario, Canada, as a university and college instructor, chiefly in the areas of the history of Christianity, world histor