Peter Walker

My research focuses on religion – especially Anglicanism – in the eighteenth-century British Empire. I am particularly interested in the Church of England’s relationship with enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and Irish Catholics, and in its relationship with loyalism and conservatism. I am also interested in documentary editing and the Digital Humanities.

My first book, The Power of Suffering: Loyalism and the Church of England in the Age of the American Revolution will be published by Yale University Press in 2027. This book studies the Americanization of colonial Anglicanism from the late-seventeenth century onwards, showing how this process made the colonial Church of England a hothouse for loyalist, conservative, and counter-revolutionary ideas by the late-eighteenth century.

I am now working on three research projects. First, I am editing, with Dr Christopher Minty (UVA), a digital documentary edition of the correspondence of the loyalist refugee Myles Cooper.  Second, I am working with an international network of collaborators to digitize the archives of the Codrington sugar plantation on Barbados, which was owned by the SPG (an Anglican missionary organization). Third, I am working on a book about missionary Anglicanism in Ireland, the Caribbean, and Native North America and the origins of residential schooling.

At the University of Wyoming, I teach upper-level classes on the Age of Revolutions, the British Empire, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, and I supervise MA students in those fields. I hold a PhD from Columbia University and MPhil and BA from the University of Oxford.

 

PUBLICATIONS:

 

Books

The Power of Suffering: Loyalism and the Church of England in the Age of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, forthcoming summer 2027).

 

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 Revolutionary Turns: Religion and America’s Founding Era, ed. Kate Carté (University of Virginia Press, 2026), 48-66.

“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 5910. Seminar on the History Profession.

HIST 5880. History Theory

HIST 5400. The Age of Revolutions

HIST 5440 / 4490. The American Revolution

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