George Southcombe

Dr Southcombe’s research to date has focused on two broad, overlapping areas: the history of seventeenth-century dissent, and the relationship between early modern literature and history.

In his work George has been engaged in uncovering evidence for different modes of popular political engagement, and, in particular, the importance of nonconformist print culture. His three-volume edition of nonconformist verse was published by Pickering and Chatto in 2012. He has also produced, alongside Dr Grant Tapsell, a broader study of the late seventeenth century, which uses visual and literary materials alongside the more conventional sources of political history. In 2019 he published a monograph, The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England: ‘The Wonders of the Lord’. This was the culmination of his work on religious dissent and he is now moving on to other fields.

He wrote a piece on scepticism towards witchcraft for a collection of essays published in honour of his old supervisor, Dr Clive Holmes, in 2017. Since then he has completed a piece with his friend and colleague Dr Alexandra Gajda on the English Witchcraft Act of 1563, which will be published in English Historical Review. He has now embarked on writing a new history of English witchcraft.

George, as well as being Director of the Sarah Lawrence Programme, is a Fellow by Special Election in History. He teaches early modern British and European history. He has supervised, or is supervising, graduate students working on various aspects of English witchcraft, Quakerism, Anglo-Japanese relations, seventeenth-century reading practices and politics, dissenting uses of history, and early modern disordered eating.

George grew up on Dartmoor in Devon and attended his local comprehensive school. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Keble College. From 2008 to 2011 he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Somerville College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In his spare time George writes occasional poetry, goes to the theatre, cooks and runs. Once, long ago, he could keep up with his young son.

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Sarah Lawrence Programme

(With Alexandra Gajda), 'The English Witchcraft Act of 1563 Revisited’, English Historical Review (forthcoming).

‘Presbyterians in the Restoration’, in John Coffey (ed.), The Oxford History of Dissenting Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 73-87.

The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England: ‘The Wonders of the Lord’ (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019).

‘The Satire of Dissent’, in The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 56-73.

‘The Quakers and Politics, 1660-1689’, in Richard C. Allen and Rosemary Moore with specialist contributors, The Quakers, 1656-1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), pp. 270-90.

(Co-edited with Grant Tapsell), Revolutionary England: Essays for Clive Holmes (London: Routledge, 2017).

‘Thomas Ady and the Politics of Scepticism in Cromwellian England’, in Southcombe and Tapsell (eds), Revolutionary England, pp. 163-75.

(Co-edited with Almut Suerbaum & Benjamin Thompson), Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

‘The Polemics of Moderation in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Suerbaum, Southcombe and Thompson (eds), Polemic, pp. 237-51.

English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660-1700, 3 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012).

(With Grant Tapsell), Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660-1714 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

‘Dissent and the Restoration Church of England’, in Grant Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church, 1660-1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 195-216.

(With Anna Bayman), ‘Shrews in Pamphlets and Plays’, in David Wootton and Graham Holderness (eds), Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500-1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 11-28.

‘“A Prophet and a Poet Both!”: Nonconformist Culture and the Literary Afterlives of Robert Wild’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 249-62.

‘Reading Early Modern Literature Historically’, Literature Compass, 7 (2010), 954-64. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00753.x/full.