David N. Hempton

Profile

David Hempton was University Professor and Professor of the History of Christianity at Boston University before coming to HDS (joining the Faculty of Divinity in spring 2007). Before that he was the Professor of Modern History and director of the School of History in the Queen's University of Belfast. He is a social historian of religion with particular expertise in populist traditions of evangelicalism in Europe, North America, and beyond. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In recent years he has delivered the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King's College London, held a fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was HDS's outstanding teacher of the year in 2008. He is the author of many articles and books, including Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850 (Stanford, 1984), winner of the Whitfield prize of the Royal Historical Society; Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740-1890 (Routledge, 1992); Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1996); The Religion of the People (Routledge, 1996); "Faith and Enlightenment," in the New Oxford History of the British Isles (Oxford, 2002); Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale, 2005); Evangelical Disenchantment (Yale, 2008); and The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (Tauris, 2011). He has research and teaching interests in religion and political culture, identity and ethnic conflict, the interdisciplinary study of lived religion, comparative secularization in Europe and North America, the history and theology of Evangelical Protestantism, and the rise of global Christianity in the early modern period.