Professor Andrew Hopper

Professor Andrew Hopper

Professor in Local and Social History

Kellogg College

andrew.hopper@conted.ox.ac.uk

I am a historian of religion, politics and society in early modern England with research expertise on the British and Irish Civil Wars. I graduated from University of York in 1999 with a doctoral thesis examining the nature of parliamentarian allegiance in civil-war Yorkshire. Thereafter I was a researcher for the JISC-funded Virtual Norfolk Project at the University of East Anglia (2000-2003) and the AHRC-funded High Court of Chivalry Project at the University of Birmingham (2003-2006). I was appointed Lecturer in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester in 2006, where I was promoted to Professor (2018) and Director of the Centre (2020). I moved to the Department for Continuing Education in September 2021.

Research Interests

I have a passion for teaching early modern and local history, as well as public engagement and collaborative projects with schools and museums. I am keen to supervise postgraduate research into early modern British history. I am best known for my two monographs 'Black Tom': Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012). I am currently working on my third monograph Widowhood and Bereavement in the English Civil Wars under contract with Oxford University Press, which is based on the AHRC-funded Civil War Petitions Project (2017-2022) for which I am Principal Investigator. I am also chair of the editorial board of Midland History, a patron of the Naseby Battlefield Project, and Academic Director of the National Civil War Centre, where I was co-curator of the Battle-Scarred exhibition.

Publications

Turncoats and Renegadoes

Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars

This book examines the practice of changing sides during the English civil wars. It examines the extent and significance of side-changing in England and Wales, but also includes comparative material from Scotland and Ireland. The first half identifies side-changers among peers, MPs, army officers, and common soldiers, before reconstructing the chronological and regional patterns to their defections.

DPhil Students

Olivia Bennison

Jack Neill

Anastasia O'Brien

Elizabeth Preston

Edward Stockley

Charlotte Whitney-Brown