My research interests lie at the intersection of religious, cultural, and intellectual history in the period from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, with an emphasis on the history of biblical scholarship in Western Europe and North America. I'm particularly interested in the early modern study of Hebrew and post-biblical Jewish literature by Reformed Protestant scholars. This is the topic of my first book (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) on the controversial English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), as well as the volume I am co-editing with Prof Joanna Weinberg and Dr Piet van Boxel, The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe (under contract with OUP's Oxford-Warburg Series). I'm currently working on a second monograph studying the influence of late sixteenth century European biblical criticism on colonial North America, especially on the popular religion and lay piety of early immigrants to Massachusetts.
I joined Oxford in 2019 from a Title A Research Fellowship (JRF) at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where I was elected in Intellectual History. I've previously held Visiting Fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; and, in July 2019, I was awarded the inaugural Lisa Jardine Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. For an up-to-date list of publications, please see my web page at the Theology Faculty: https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-kirsten-macfarlane.