Brent Sirota
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs
Department of History
Withers Hall 266
Bio
Dr. Brent S. Sirota is associate professor and the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. He specializes in the religious and political history of Great Britain and the wider British world in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received an MA in Religious Studies in 2001, and a Ph.D. in History in 2007, both from the University of Chicago. He has taught in the Department of History at North Carolina State University since 2007. Dr. Sirota has written a number of articles and book chapters on the history and politics of the Church of England in the decades before and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. His first book, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680-1730 was published by Yale University Press in 2014. It was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies. In 2019, The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire, a collection of essays he co-edited with Allan I. Macinnes, was published by Boydell Press.
In the academic year 2009-10, Sirota was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2014-15, he held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. In 2019-20, he held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.
Sirota is currently working on a book project about established churches in the long eighteenth century Atlantic world entitled The Other Separation of Church and State: Ecclesiologies of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1688-1848.
Sirota teaches courses on British history, British political thought, Tudor-Stuart England, church and state relations in European history, European state formation, and historiography and historical methods.
Office Hours
- Mondays from 1-3 p.m., or by appointment.
Website
https://ncsu.academia.edu/BrentSirota
Research Publications
Books
Journal Articles
“Robert Nelson’s Festivals and Fasts and the Problem of the Sacred in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Church History: Studies in Christianity 84, 2 (September 2015)
“The Church of England, the Law of Nations and the Leghorn Chaplaincy Affair, 1703-1713,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48, 3 (2015), 283-306
“The Occasional Conformity Controversy, Moderation and the Anglican Critique of Modernity, 1700-1714,” Historical Journal 57, 1 (Jan 2014): 81-105
“The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the Making of the Postrevolutionary Church of England, 1687-1702,” Journal of British Studies, 52.1 (Jan. 2013), pp. 26-54
Book Chapters
“Ecclesiology and the Varieties of Romanticism in American Christianity, 1825-1850,” in A Companion to American Religious History, ed. Benjamin E. Park (Routledge, forthcoming)
“The London Jews’ Society and the Roots of Premillennialism, 1809-1829,” in Converting Europe: British Protestant Missions in the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries, ed., Simone Maghenzani and Stefano Villani (Routledge, 2020)
“The Backlash against Anglican Catholicity in The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire, ed., Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes, (Boydell, 2019), pp. 60-81
“Anglicanism and the Nationalization of Maritime Space,” in Phillip J. Stern and CarlWennerlind, eds. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (Oxford UP, 2013)
(with Matt Hedstrom) “Establishing and Disestablishing Religion in the Atlantic World,” Religion and the State in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe and America (Lexington Books, 2012), pp. xiii-xxii
“The Leviathan is not safely to be angered: Country Ideology and Anglican High Church Thought, 1688-1702” in Religion and the State in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe and America (Lexington Books, 2012), pp. 41-61
Online Articles
The Other Separation of Church and State: Anglican Ecclesiologies of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Age of Revolutions
“1714, A Glimpse of Secularity: The Church and the Hanoverian Succession,” Australian Broadcasting Company: Religion and Ethics (July 2014)
“The First Big Society: Eighteenth-Century Britain’s Age of Benevolence,” Australian Broadcasting Company: Religion and Ethics (Jan. 2014)
Book Reviews
“Review of Sara Slinn, The Education of the Anglican Clergy 1780-1839,” in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, vol. 88, no. 2 (June 2019) 534-536
“Review of Kevin Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England,” Church History: Studies in Christianity & Culture, vol. 87, no. 3 (Sept. 2018), 907-909
“Review of William J. Bulman, The Anglican Enlightenment Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648-1715,” The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 50, 2 (Spring 2018), 162-165
“Review of Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith, eds. Religion and Women in Britain, c.1660-1760,” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 40:3 (Sept. 2017), pp. 473-474
“Review of Phillip Tovey, Anglican Confirmation 1662-1820,” Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies (forthcoming)
“Review of Jeffrey Stephen, Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland, 1689-1716,” Journal of British Studies, 53.3 (July 2014): 782-784
“Review of Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution,” History: Reviews of New Books 42.3 (July 2014): 91-92
“Review of Edward Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World,” Journal of British Studies 53.1 (Jan. 2014), 193-195
“Review of Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Modern Atlantic World,” Journal of British Studies 52.1 (Jan 2013), 218-219
“Review of Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700,” Journal of Modern History 83.3 (Sept. 2011), 637-639
Presentations
“The Consecration of Samuel Seabury and the Crisis of Atlantic Episcopacy, 1782-1807,” Boston Area Seminar on Early American History, January 2019
“The Making of American Episcopacy, 1782-1815,” North American Conference on British Studies, Providence, RI, October 2018
“The Americanization of High Churchmanship, 1789-1815,” Religion and Politics in Early America, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, March 2018
“Sovereignty & Catholicity in Eighteenth Century England,” Yale Center for Historical Enquiry & the Social Sciences, New Haven, CT, October 2017
“The Crucible of Whig Divinity, 1708-1721” North American Conference on British Studies, Washington, D.C., November 2016
“The Ideological Roots of British Premillennialism, 1810-30,” Romanticism’s Futures, Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, November 2016
“The London Jews’ Society and the Roots of Premillennialism, 1809-1828,” Converting Europe: Protestant Missions, Propaganda and Literature from the British Isles (1600-1900), University of Cambridge, September 2016
“The Other Religious Liberty,” North American Conference on British Studies, Little Rock, AR, November 2015
“Toward a Politics of the Sacred in Eighteenth-Century England,” Huntington Library Long-Term Fellows Working Group, San Marino, CA, April 2015.
“Signs of the Times: The Apocalypse in British Christianity, 1800-1850,” Huntington Library Food for Thought Seminar, San Marino, CA. April 2015.
“Robert Nelson’s Festivals and Fasts and the Problem of Sacrilege in Early Eighteenth Century England,” USC-Huntington Early Modern British History Workshop, 21 March 2015
“Religion and the Hanoverian Succession,” North American Conference on British Studies, Minneapolis, MN, November 2014
“Sacrilege: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies, Williamsburg, VA, March 2014
“On Religious Modernity, or, The Crisis of the Sacred in England, 1660-1760,” Mellon Consortium on British Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, October 2013
“Sovereignty and Religion after Westphalia: The Leghorn Chaplaincy Affair, 1700-1714,” Conference on Religion and the State, Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, April 2013.