Professor of Church HistoryBA, PhD (Cantab) Email: D.H.McLeod@bham.ac.uk |
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Hugh McLeod took his BA in History at Cambridge University in 1966 and his PhD in 1971. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Theology at Lund University. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
In 1970 he came to Birmingham as Research Fellow in Modern History. After teaching at Warwick University, he taught in the Department of Theology at Birmingham from 1973 to 2004, becoming Professor of Church History in 1994, and Head of Department 1995-7, before returning to Modern History in 2004. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Amsterdam and Uppsala, has given the Vonhoff Lectures at the University of Groningen (2004) and the Hulsean Lectures at the University of Cambridge (2008), was president of the Ecclesiastical History Society 2002-3, and is president of CIHEC, the international organisation of historians of Christianity 2005-2010.
McLeod’s research is focused on the social history of religion in western Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent book, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. The period from the later 1950s to the early 1970s was a time of decisive religious change throughout the Western world. In many countries there was a rapid decline in church-going, and at the same time the religious options widened dramatically. The ’Sixties’ were an international phenomenon in religion as in so much else, and while the central focus of the book is on England, considerable attention is also given to other countries, notably France and the United States. The book makes extensive use of oral history in order to show how the changes were experienced by ‘ordinary people’, but at the same time the explosive events of these years are placed within the context of longer-term social change.
His next project will be a book on Religion and the Rise of Sport in Modern England (the subject of his Hulsean Lectures in March 2008). The lectures focused on the period from the French Revolution to the Second World War, arguing that in this period sport provided an arena in which many of the battles between religious and secularising forces and between rival versions of Christianity were fought out. During this period the relationship between religion and sport went through successive phases of repulsion in the first half of the 19th century, growing attraction in the middle decades of the century, intimacy in the later 19th century, and gradual separation in the 20th century. The book, planned for completion in 2010, will look at each side of this many-sided and constantly changing relationship, including elite and amateur sport, ‘muscular Christians’ and those for whom sport offered a way of escape from the all too powerful influences of religion in English society. It will also look at developments since World War II, and it will place England in an international context, drawing on research in other countries, such as the United States, France and Ireland, where more work on this theme has been done.
His first book, Class and Religion in the late Victorian City (1974) was a study of London between 1880-1914. Drawing on contemporary social surveys, statistics of church-going, autobiographies and local church records, it introduced themes, including urbanisation, secularisation, and the relationship between religion and social class, which have remained central to his work. It prepared the way for his most ambitious project, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870-1914 (1996), a comparative study of church, synagogue and popular religion in three of the world’s greatest cities, highlighting the interaction between religion and class, gender and ethnicity.
McLeod’s second book, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1970 (1981), a revised edition of which appeared as Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1989 (1997), was a pioneering attempt at identifying long-term patterns of religious development, with special reference to the relationships between religion and politics, and between religion and social change. Another work of synthesis was Religion and Society in England 1850-1914, which made considerable use of material from interviews conducted by the pioneers of oral history in the 1960s and 1970s.
Secularisation in Western Europe 1848-1914 (2000) compared trends in England, France and Germany, looking not only at changes in individual belief and practice and relations between church and state, but also at changing national identities and the role of religion in popular culture. He has edited several books, either singly or as part of a team, including in 2006 World Christianities c.1914-c.2000, volume 9 of the Cambridge History of Christianity. He is editor of the Routledge series, Christianity and Society in the Modern World, which he founded with the late Bob Scribner in 1983, and he is on the editorial board of Church History, Church History and Religious Culture, Hispania Sacra, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Labour History Review and Quaker Studies.
Undergraduate
Level 1
Introduction to Christian History
The Fall and Rise of Sport in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Level 2
Christianity and Politics in the Modern World
Christianisation and Dechristianisation in Modern Europe
Religion and Revolution in the Twentieth Century
Level 3
Britain in the Sixties
Reviewing History: The Capital Punishment Debate in the 19th and 20th centuries
Postgraduate
Programme Leader for the MA and MPhilB in the History of Christianity
Seminars for the MPhilB in Twentieth Century British History
Hugh McLeod supervises research in the following areas:
Social history of religion in western Europe and the USA in the 19th/20th centuries
Britain in the 1950s and 1960s
History of sport in modern Britain
The debates over capital punishment in the 19th/20th centuries
The Religious Crisis of the 1960's, Oxford University Press (2007)
Editor of and contributor of five chapters to The Cambridge History of Christianity, volume 9, World Christianities c.1914-c.2000 (Cambridge University Press 2006)
‘The religious crisis of the 1960s,’ Journal of Modern European History, 3/2 (2005), pp 205-230
‘God and the gallows: Christianity and capital punishment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,’ in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation (Boydell & Brewer, 2004), pp 330-356
Editor with Werner Ustorf and author of Introduction to The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
‘”Thews and Sinews”: Nonconformists and Sport in Nineteenth-Century England,’ in David Bebbington and Timothy Larsen (eds), Christianity and Cultural Aspirations (Sheffield Academic Press, 2003)
‘Anticlericalism in Britain, c.1870-1914,’ in Nigel Aston and Matthew Cragoe (eds), Anticlericalism (Alan Sutton, 2000), pp 198-220
Secularisation in Western Europe 1848-1914, Palgrave Macmillan 2000
