Dr Colin Donnelly

Biography:

I completed a BA and MPhil at the University of Oxford, before going on to a PhD at Durham University, which I completed in 2023. In 2023-4 I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Early Modern History at the University of Limerick, working on the social history of deviance at early modern German universities. In 2024 I became Assistant Professor of Church History at Virginia Theological Seminary in the United States. Not content with two international moves in two years, in 2025 I made a third, returning to Oxford to take up my current role as Associate Professor of Reformation & Early Modern Christianities and Tutorial Fellow in Theology at Keble College.

Research Interests:

Reformation history and theology; early modern history; Tudor England; the Holy Roman Empire; the history of universities; the history of the soul and afterlife.

Current Projects:

I am currently completing a monograph, under contract at Boydell & Brewer, on a key network of early English evangelicals which emerged at the University of Cambridge in the 1520s and 30s, and their impact on the English Reformation. I am also in the early stages of a new project on deviant and radical ideas of the soul and afterlife from 1500-1700. This project will particularly foreground the development and influence of psychopannychism, the doctrine that upon death the soul sleeps until the last judgement rather than proceeding immediately to heaven or hell, and the crucial role it played in changing ideas about the afterlife in the early modern period, including in laying the groundwork for the denial of the existence of the soul altogether.

Courses Taught:

Figure of Jesus; Early Modern Christianity

Recent Publications:

Colin Donnelly, ‘Rebellion and Resistance in the English Reformation’, in Ruthanna Hooke, Kyle Lambelet, & Altagracia Perez-Bullard (eds.), Have Mercy (Alexandria, VA: Virginia Theological Seminary Press, 2025). https://vts.edu/have-mercy-initiative/obey-god-more-than-human-authorities/.

Colin Donnelly & Alec Ryrie, ‘The Soul’, in ed. Susan Amussen & Paul Monod, New Cambridge History of Britain, Volume 3, 1500-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Colin Donnelly, “‘Wherfore amend your lyves yff yowe wyll be savyd”: the Soteriology of Thomas Bilney’, Reformation (2023), Volume 28, issue 1, 63-79. http://doi.org/10.1080/13574175.2023.2187934.

Colin Donnelly, ‘On the Vulgate of Thomas Bilney’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2022), Volume 73, issue 4, 837-844. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022046922001026.

Stephen Taylor, Giles Gasper, Tianna Uchacz, Hannah Smithson, Tom McLeish, Kaja Hollandsrud, Freya Horsfeld, Colin Donnelly, Ivana Evans, 'Cultural Heritage 360 A Report for the AHRC Programme: Where Next?'. (2022) https://dro.dur.ac.uk/37491/1/37491.pdf?DDD7+DDD17+DDD6+DDO65+DDD32+vbdv77.