Dr Ashley Walsh

Biography

I took my MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees at Downing College, Cambridge, after which I taught at the University of Cambridge and Durham University before coming to Cardiff University as Lecturer in Early Modern History.

Honours and awards

Teaching Awards

• Supervisor of the Year 2018-19, Department for Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge (£100 honorarium)

Professional memberships

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Academic positions

• 2019-present: Lecturer in Early Modern History, Cardiff University
• 2014-2019: Supervisor, University of Cambridge
• 2017-2018: Teaching Fellow in Early Modern History, Durham University

Speaking engagements

• [Invited] 'The Standing Army Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain', presented at Commonwealth Men and Women: The Legacy of English Republicanism in Britain and Europe, Newcastle University, 14 September 2021.
• [Invited] 'Fashioning a Protestant Civil Religion: England, Switzerland, and the "Helvetic Trio"', presented at Debating Enlightenment, Durham University, 6 July 2021.
• [Invited] 'England and Switzerland in the European Enlightenment', presented at Durham Early Modern Conference, 8-10 July 2020.
• [Invited] ‘Civil Religion in the British Enlightenments’, presented at Civil Religion from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, Newcastle University, 24 October 2019.
• [Invited] ‘The Saxon Republic in Seventeenth-Century England’, presented at Britain in the 17th Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, 15 November 2018.
• [Invited] ‘Ciceronianism and the Multitude in the Civil Religion of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, presented at Locating the Ancient World in Early Modern Subversive Thought, Newcastle University, 12 April 2018.
• [Invited] Panellist on ‘Sites of Possibility or Repression? Walking the Memories of the City’, Cambridge Festival of Ideas, 23 October 2016.
• [Invited] ‘Priestcraft, Kingship, and the Godly Commonwealth in Eighteenth-Century England’, presented at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, 2 September 2016.
• [Invited] Respondent to Professor John Shepherd, ‘Into Government: Labour 1924-1935’, at Labour’s Shifting Sands, Anglia Ruskin University, 9 June 2016.
• [Invited] ‘Town, Gown, and Farm: The Early Labour Party in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire’, presented at Rural Radicalism, Labour History Unit, Anglia Ruskin University, 4 June 2016.
• [Invited] ‘“Radical Toryism” in the History of the Labour Movement’, presented at the Cambridge Literary Festival, 9 April 2016.
• ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury in the Context of the Long Reformation’, presented at Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, 24 July 2015.
• ‘Private Conscience, Public Worship, and the Church-State Relationship in Viscount Bolingbroke’, presented at the London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought, 5 June 2015.
• ‘“Public Walks as well as Private Gardens”: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury between the Long Reformation and the Enlightenment’, presented at the Graduate Workshop in Intellectual History, University of Cambridge, 22 October 2014.
• ‘Whiggism and England’s “Long Reformation” after the “Glorious Revolution”’, presented at Godly Governance: Religion and Political Culture in the Early Modern World, c. 1500-1750, University of York, 27 June 2014.

Publications

We are currently unable to retrieve the list of publications. Visit our institutional repository.

Teaching

Year 1
HS0001: A World Full of Gods
HS1105: The Making of the Modern World, 1750-1970
HS1117: Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution
HS1119: History in Practice Part I: Questions, Frameworks and Audiences
HS1120: History in Practice Part II: Sources, Evidence and Argument

Year 2
HS6202: Making History: Historians, Evidence, Audiences
HS6203: Debating History
HS6215: European Enlightenment(s): The View from the Margins

Year 3
HS1801: Dissertation
HS1802: Ridicule, Republics, Revolutions: The (Awkward) Enlightenment in England

MA in History
HST079: Reading Modernity
HST081: Sources and Evidence: Advanced Historical Research Skills
HST083: Theories, Methods and Practices of History
HST085: Writing History: Dissertation Preparation
HST086: Dissertation

I am an intellectual, religious, and political historian of early modern Europe with a particular interest in the relationship between religion and the Enlightenment and the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought. I am especially interested in the history of civil religion in the 'long Reformation' and the Enlightenment, showing how lay and clerical intellectuals drew on the political and religious ideas of the classical world, Renaissance, and Protestant Reformation in their analyses of the church-state relationship and defences of religious toleration. I explore these and related themes in my recent monograph, Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800 (2020) and in articles in the Historical Journal, History of Political Thought, English Historical Review, and Journal of British Studies.

Supervision

Current supervision