Dr William White

William joined the University of Hertfordshire as Lecturer in History in September 2023. His research focuses on the political, religious, and intellectual history of early modern Britain and the Atlantic World. He completed his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 2020 and then held a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of York. 

William's first monograph, The Lord's Battle: Preaching, Print and Royalism during the English Revolution, was published by Manchester University Press in April 2023. This showed how the production of sermon literature during the Civil Wars and Interregnum was integral in creating royalist identities, mobilising support for Charles I's war effort, and influencing the decision making of political elites. 

William is currently writing a second book on ideas and practices of peace during the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, provisionally entitled The Pursuit of Peace in Revolutionary Britain and the Atlantic, 1637-c.1670. This seeks to move away from scholarly preoccupation with the causes of these violent conflicts and to think instead about how contemporaries pursued their mitigation and resolution. It also stresses the need to understand the British problem of peace in a wider Atlantic and colonial context. 

A paper based on this research was awarded the 2022 Pollard Prize, for the best paper presented by an early career scholar at an Institute of Historical Research seminar, and published as an article in Historical Research in 2023. William has also published journal articles on memories of religious conformity during the Interregnum (English Historical Review), the political thought of the early Stuart MP Sir John Eliot (Historical Journal), and the uses of disinformation in print culture during the early 1640s (Historical Research). 

William is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

- The British Revolutions (c. 1630-1670) and their Atlantic Context

- Political and Religious Ideas

- Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution

- Print Culture and Political Communication

- Indigenous Histories of Early America

William leads the following modules:

Close Encounters: Natives and Settlers in Colonial America, 1600-1780 (2024-)

4SHE2020: History on the Page, Stage and Screen

4SHE2024: Africa in the World, 1500-1850

5HUM1202: Everyday Lives: An Intimate History of Twentieth-Century Women (2023-24)