Dr Joshua Bennett
Associate Professor in History: European Political and Social Thought, 1848-c.1950
Lady Margaret Hall
Research Interests
I am interested in the history of liberalism and its critics since the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to historical thought and social theory, and the implications of religious and secularist beliefs in these areas of debate. My first book, 'God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845-1914' (OUP, 2019), explored the ways in which progressive and developmental understandings of religious history, which owed a great deal to the influence of German Idealism, became integral to the Victorian liberal imagination. I am currently working on a comparative and transnational book about the relationship between secularism, religion, and the beginnings of liberal social thought in Britain, France, Germany, and North America during the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. I have also written chapters for the forthcoming 'Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Bible in the Age of Empire'; the 'Cambridge History of the Papacy'; and the 'Oxford History of Modern German Theology'. I continue to pursue other projects in the histories of historiography and religious thought, both in modern British and German intellectual history.
https://www.lmh.ox.ac.uk/our-academics/fellows/dr-joshua-bennett
Publications
God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845 - 1914
Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, this book offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history.