Research

Research Projects

Wilderness huts

After my first experience bothying, staying in basic mountain shelters in Scotland which are free for all wanderers to use, I have embarked on projects that examine places of temporary dwelling in wild landscapes and their connections to walking, landscapes and communities. Such huts or shelters are often located in remote locations and beautiful landscapes, but they are also a place of community and connection. I am interested in exploring this culture of walking, wandering and staying, and what it can tell us about our connections to place, nature and people.

Global Mennonite diasporas

I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Leadership award with almost £1million to lead a project entitled am currently working on a book project entitled Global Faiths: Anabaptist Confessional Communities of Dispersion, 1550-present day. This work breaks new ground by reassessing the history of confessional diasporas and migration that emerged from the early strains of radical thought in the reformation. It adopts a new global and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the legacies of religious change and migration. My work interrogates the ways in which non-conformist confessional groups that came out of the Anabaptist tradition in the reformations of the sixteenth century – groups such as the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish – existed beyond the formalities of institutional churches and sustained communities across continents and centuries.

Material Culture and Migratory Identities

I have also worked on a project, supported by a grant from the Humboldt Yale History Network, which focuses on migration and material cultures in Anabaptist diasporas. It reveals how materialities sustained communal identity, embodying memory and emotion for Anabaptist groups in flux as they migrated. My research follows the material remnants of early modern Anabaptist groups across national boundaries and examines material global stories that connected Anabaptist communities across space and time. Materialities were important for ‘after-generations’ (those descending from the first generation of migrants), and objects became repositories of emotional, familial and communal bonds in the face of dispersion.

Lutheran Culture

From 2012-2015 I worked on a British Academy funded project on Lutheran culture after Luther’s death. This project examined the creation and expression of Lutheran culture in the second half of the sixteenth century and explored how Lutheran pastors constructed their world without Luther. Lutheran culture ranged from hymns, through moralistic and humorous Devil Books, to books on subjects as diverse as hunting, local history, and mining, as well as relying on images and objects. This research focused on the memorialisation and diffusion of the Lutheran Reformation, as pastors and theologians used a variety of cultural forms to shape Lutheranism in the years after Martin Luther’s death. With the recent Reformation anniversary year of 2017, examination of this culture has never been more relevant.

Anabaptism in the 16th Century

My first book, Baptism, Brotherhood and Belief analysed the evolution of Anabaptist identity in the lands of the Saxon princes from 1525 to 1585. Adopting the idea of a ‘thick description’, rather than looking at intellectual origins, it shows how Anabaptism’s development in central Germany in the sixteenth-century was fundamentally influenced by its engagement with Lutheran theology, and that Anabaptism might be seen as a point on a spectrum of solution to religious concerns.