Alexandra Walsham

Alexandra Marie Walsham (born 4 January 1966) is an English-Australian academic historian. She specialises in early modern Britain and in the impact of the Protestant and Catholic reformations. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and is currently a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is co-editor of Past & Present and vice-president of the Royal Historical Society.

Early life and education Walsham was born on 4 January 1966 in Hayle, Cornwall, and spent her early childhood in England. She and her family emigrated to Australia when she was young. In 1990, she was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to study early modern history at the University of Cambridge. She undertook postgraduate research at Trinity College, Cambridge under the supervision of Patrick Collinson, the then Regius Professor of History. In 1995, she completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree with a thesis titled Aspects of Providentialism in Early Modern England.

Academic career Walsham began her academic career as a research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, between 1993 and 1996. She is one of the series editors of the Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, and co-editor of Past & Present, an academic journal specialising in social history. In February 2015, she gave the annual Bishop Van Mildert Lecture at the University of Durham; it was titled "Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England". She gave the Neale Lecture at University College London in October 2015. She was elected to give the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2017/2018.

Honours In 1999, Walsham was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). In 2009, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). In 2013, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to history.

In 2000, she was awarded the Longman-History Today Award and the American Historical Association’s Morris D. Forkosch Prize for her monograph Providence in Early Modern England.

Selected works