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Professor Laurence Brockliss

Professor Emeritus of Early Modern French History

Magdalen College

01865 (2)76083laurence.brockliss@magd.ox.ac.ukLawrence Brockliss has served on many teaching, advisory and management committees for the Faculty of History over the course of the last 15 years. Professor Brockliss works on the history of education, science and medicine in early modern France and Britain and has a general interest in the history of European ideas.  He is particularly interested in the institutionalisation of ideas. His books include French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1987),  The Medical World of Early Modern France (1997, with Colin Jones),  Calvet's Web (2002) and the prize-winning Nelson's Surgeon (2005, with John Cardwell and Michael Moss). Professor Brockliss is also interested in the history of childhood and is director of the Oxford Centre for the History of Childhood, the only such centre in the UK.

Research Interests

  • Early modern France and Britain 1500-1850

Professor Brockliss has just finished writing a one-volume history of the University of Oxford.  He is also preparing for publication the MS autobiography of a Montpellier doctor, naturalist and tourist, Pierre-Joseph Amoreux (1741-1824). This is the fullest autobiography left by a French republican of letters in the Age of Enlightenment.

Professor Brockliss is also involved in two collaborative research projects.  The first with Michael  Moss and John Cardwell is a study of the fight against malaria in the long nineteenth century and is essentially a history of the political economy of a disease.  The second, again with Micheal Moss, is described more fully below . It is a study of the devlopment of the professions as a distinctive class in nineteenth-century Britain based on the study of a thousand families through four generations.

 

Cover of The University of Oxford a History
Featured Publication

The University of Oxford: A History

(OUP, 2016)

This fresh and readable account gives a complete history of the University of Oxford, from its beginnings in the eleventh century to the present day. Written by one of the leading authorities on the history of universities internationally, it traces Oxford's improbable rise from provincial backwater to one of the world's leading centres of research and teaching. 

DPhil Students

Leif Hammer

DPhil Student