Peter Walker

I work on early modern Britain, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World, with particular interests in religion, empire, and revolution. I teach classes in those fields, as well as in European and World history. I received my PhD from Columbia University in 2016 and MPhil (2010) and BA (2008) from the University of Oxford. I am working on a book, under contract with Yale University Press, which asks how colonial Anglicans engaged with the religious modernity emerging in the Age of Revolutions. This project has been supported by a Summer Stipend award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whitehill Prize from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Prichard Prize from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, and a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. In addition to my main book project, I am pursuing a number of collaborative projects. I am editing, with Dr Christopher Minty (UVA), a digital documentary edition of the correspondence of the loyalist refugee Myles Cooper. I am working with Dr Melissa Morris (UW) on a Digital Humanities project that applies HTR to the archives of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. I have also begun work on a second book project on residential schooling in eighteenth-century Ireland.

 

Publications:

Books

The Power of Suffering: Loyalism and the Church of England in the Age of the American Revolution (under contract with Yale University Press).

 

Co-editor with Christopher Minty, The Cause of Loyalty: The Revolutionary Worlds of Myles Cooper (digital collection of edited primary sources, in progress).

 

Journal Articles

“The Bishop Controversy, the Imperial Crisis, and Religious Radicalism in New England, 1763-74,” New England Quarterly 90, 3 (September 2017): 306-43. Winner of the 2016 Whitehill Prize.

 

Essays in Edited Collections

“Thomas Barton’s Crisis of Conscience: Community, Salvation, and Oaths of Allegiance on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” in The Consequences of Conflict: The American Revolution and Religion, ed. Kate Carté (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).

 

“Religion, Politics, and Martyrdom in the American Revolution: The Loyalist Church of England Clergy,” in A Companion to American Religious History, ed. Benjamin E. Park (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 59-70.

 

“Tolerating Protestants: Antipopery, Antipuritanism, and Religious Toleration in Britain, 1776-1829,” in Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism, ed. Evan Haefeli (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 257-87.

 

“‘An Isolated Portion of the Community’? English Protestant Dissenters’ Campaign for Toleration, 1787-1828,” in Believers in the Nation: European Religious Minorities in the Age of Nationalism (1815-1914), eds. Wessel Kruhl, Roberto Dagnino, and Alessandro Grazi (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 117-36.

 

Book Reviews

“Religious Liberty, Christian Nationalism, and the American Revolution”: A Review Essay of Adam Jortner, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) and Jacob E. Hicks, To Contest with All the Powers of Darkness: New England Baptists, Religious Liberty, and New Political Landscapes, 1740-1833 (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 2024), William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 82, 3 (July 2025). 

 

Review of Joseph Hardwick, Prayer, Providence and Empire: Special Worship in the British World, 1783–1919 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), in Journal of British Studies 62, 2 (2023): 566-67.

 

Review of Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 90, 1 (2021): 201-203.

 

Courses taught:
HIST 5880. History Theory

HIST 5440 / 4490. The American Revolution

HIST 5400. The Age of Revolutions

HIST 5425 / 4425. Britain’s Global Empires: 1558 to the Present

HIST 5270 / 4270. France: Old Regime & Revolution

HIST 4990. The Making of the Modern World, 1500-1800 (Study Abroad in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK).

HIST 4030. Senior Capstone Seminar.

HIST/RELI 3240: Reformation and Enlightenment Christianity

HIST 3020. Historical Methods

HIST 2060. Early Modern Europe: from the Renaissance to the French Revolution

HIST 1320. World History to 1500

HIST 1120: Western Civilization II (from 1700)

FYS 1101. Hamilton’s America: Beyond the Musical