Ethan Shagan

Early modern Britain

Office: 102C Harris
Phone: 847-491-3152
E-mail: shagannorthwestern.edu

Ethan H. Shagan (Ph.D. Princeton, 2000) specializes in the history of early modern Britain, particularly the English Reformation and other aspects of religion and politics under the Tudors. His first book, Popular politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association, the Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society, the Roland H. Bainton Prize from Sixteenth Century Studies, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association.

Since the publication of Popular Politics and the English Reformation, he has edited a collection of essays on English Catholicism entitled Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005); he has published articles in Past and Present, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, and The Historical Journal; he has become co-editor of the book series Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, Cambridge University Press; he sits on the editorial board of The Sixteenth Century Journal; and most recently he has become North American Editor of Renaissance Studies, the journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies in the United Kingdom.

His current project is a history of the ideal of moderation and the “middle way” from the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution, arguing in pleasantly iconoclastic fashion that moderation has served in English history as a polemical weapon and a tool of social, political, and religious violence.

Curriculum Vitae