Sophie Aldred

Dr Sophie Aldred is a historian of early modern Britain and its expanding world. She completed her BA, MSt and DPhil in History at Oxford, the last in 2024 under the supervision of George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell. Before joining Wadham as a Junior Research Fellow, she was Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern Christianities in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and Lecturer in Early Modern History at Christ Church and Jesus College. She holds a Marshall Research Fellowship at the Pharos Foundation.

Sophie's research draws together themes and methodologies from the history of the book, cultural and intellectual history (including the historical sociology of knowledge), gender history, and the religious and political history of the seventeenth century. She is currently writing a monograph on the library of the parliamentarian John Robartes (1606–1685), showing how legal, biblical, and historical scholarship informed debates over authority, conscience, and governance during the Civil Wars and Restoration. Her next project, Reading and the Colonial Context: Precedent, Providence, and the Exercise of Early Empire, c.1630–1702, examines the intellectual and moral frameworks that shaped England's early expansion overseas, exploring how books and acts of reading informed colonial administration and debates over empire. Her work has been published in Historical Research and on the History of Parliament blog, and further articles are forthcoming or under review.