Dr Simon Skinner

Dr Simon Skinner
Associate Professor of History
Balliol College
01865 (2)77731
simon.skinner@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

  • Nineteenth-century British political and religious history
  • Robert Peel
  • The social history of motorcycling

I work on British political and religious history, mainly in the first half of the nineteenth century. My initial interest in reactionary and paternalist politics during the age of reform took me to the subject of the social and political thought of the Oxford Movement, and my doctoral work on that subject culminated in an OUP book of 2004, Tractarians and the 'Condition of England'. I am currently working on a book on Peel and religion, with particular attention to the political consequences of the Maynooth Grant controversy.

My interests lie in nineteenth-century British political and religious history.

I have written variously on paternalist and reactionary thought in the 1830s and 1840s, and my book on the political and social thought of the Tractarians was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. I have contributed a number of individual and group entries on clergymen, writers, and motorcycle racers to theOxford Dictionary of National Biography, and am currently working on religion and Peel in the 1830s and 1840s. I have broadcast on subjects ranging from Queen Victoria to speedway racing.

Past supervision topics include Canning and toryism, Sir James Graham and party, the historical outlook of J. M. Neale, popular Conservatism in the 1830s, and Gladstone's historical intelligence; present topics include Spencer Perceval's evangelicalism, anti-Peelite Conservatism in the 1830s and 1840s, intellectuals and the Eastern Question, and Disraeli's religious thought. I am a convenor of the Modern British History graduate seminar.

 

See page on Balliol College website

Teaching

I would like to hear from potential DPhil students regarding early and mid-nineteenth-century British political and religious history.

I would like to hear from potential Masters students regarding early and mid-nineteenth-century British political and religious history.

I currently teach:

Prelims

 FHS
History of the British Isles V (1685-1830) History of the British Isles V (1685-1830)
History of the British Isles VI (1815-1924) History of the British Isles VI (1815-1924)
History of the British Isles VII (since 1900) History of the British Isles VII (since 1900)
Approaches to History Disciplines of History
Historiography: From Tacitus to Weber  

Publications

  • Political and social thought

    November 2018
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman

  • Social and Political Commentary

    June 2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement
    This book which is devided into seven parts reflects the rich and diverse nature of scholarship on the Oxford Movement and provides pointers to further study and new lines of enquiry.
    Religion

  • The British Critic: Newman and Mozley, Oakley and Ward

    June 2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement
    This book which is devided into seven parts reflects the rich and diverse nature of scholarship on the Oxford Movement and provides pointers to further study and new lines of enquiry.
    Religion

  • 'A triumph of the rich': Tractarians and the Reformation

    April 2014
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
    That hostility to the Reformation was a feature of the Oxford Movement's outlook is a truism, but Tractarians’ anti-Reformation sentiments went much further than the purely theological. Tractarians consistently held that in its repudiation of antiquity and elevation of sola scriptura, the Reformation had launched a wider rationalism whose socio-economic as well as religious consequences they abhorred. If a Tractarian paternalism – which mourned the welfare consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries, and the rise of capitalism and its bourgeoisie – had much in common with other nineteenth-century social criticism, a crucial difference emerged at the point of prescription. Their uncompromising advocacy of the church as the sole agency of amelioration, and promotion of such schemes as sisterhoods, sharply distinguished Tractarians from advocates of legislative intervention or ethical socialism. Tractarians therefore looked not forward, to the ideal of a welfare state, but back, to the ideal of a welfare church.

  • Oriel to Oliver Twist: Noetics and Tractarians at Large

    November 2013
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The History of Oriel College, Oxford
    This is the first history of Oriel College, Oxford for over a hundred years. It is an account of a distinctive society, the college of Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Gilbert White, Thomas Arnold, John Henry Newman and Cecil Rhodes, written by a group of specialist scholars whose aim it is to place the body of Orielenses in the context not only of Oxford but of British and international history. It is therefore more than a domestic history of the college; it explores the ideas which have animated, and often divided, the members of the college in every generation since 1326, especially during the brilliant Noetic era of the early nineteenth century and the Oxford movement which succeeded it; and it considers the impact of Oriel on national life, including sport and the government of the British Empire. Though designed to conform to the highest standards of historical scholarship, the chapters are accessible to the general reader, and are fully illustrated throughout. Maps and plans are provided to make the physical development of the college easy to follow.
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