Dr. Gareth Atkins

Biography

Gareth Atkins is a historian specializing in religion, politics, and culture in modern Britain. His main research focus is on religious networks that operated at the interface of the 'early modern' world and the pluralistic religious marketplace of modernity. His monograph, Converting Britannia: Evangelicals and British Public Life, 1770-1840, published by Boydell & Brewer in 2019, reconstructs the networks through which evangelicals and moralists influenced politics and public life, reshaping ideas of nationhood and individual identity. Additionally, he has worked on the edition of William Wilberforce's previously unpublished diaries and is investigating the relationship between religion and technology in the context of the nineteenth-century British world. He received a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2009 to 2012, during which he produced articles on naval heroes and edited the book Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain, published by Manchester University Press in 2016. Atkins co-edited the collection Chosen Peoples: Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century and has been involved in discussing the cultural media messages surrounding debates on stained glass. His interests encompass belief and unbelief in modern Britain, politics, material culture, and the construction of masculinities. He lectures and supervises Papers 5 and 10 in British Political, Economic, and Social History (c. 1688-1880s) and teaches Historical Argument and Practice.

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