I am Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida, where I also am Associate Director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. For two decades I taught at Ohio University, where I was Professor of History and the founding director of the Menard Family George Washington Forum. Born and brought up in Ruston, Louisiana, I did my undergraduate work at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and my graduate work at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Professor in the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University.
My scholarly work focuses on the early history of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world, with particular focus on religion and politics. My most recent book is Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (2018). My latest co-edited book is Capitalism: Histories (2025). In addition to co-editing People Power: Popular Sovereignty from Machiavelli to Modernity (2022), Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850 (2020) and God in the Enlightenment (2016), I have published Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (2007). With Jeff Collins, Raffaella Santi, Shannon Stimson and Sam Zeitlin, I edit a new book series on intellectual history called Ideas and Practices, 1300–1850 (Boydell/Durham University IMEMS Press). I have also written for National Review, Modern Age, Claremont Review of Books and the University Bookman.
The two book projects on which I am now working are The World to Come: The Sacred and the Secular in England, 1660–1760, which examines the sacralisation of the modern state, and The Religion of the State: Sovereignty, Pluralism and Constitutionalism, 1890–1920, which focuses especially on the thought of Lord Acton’s literary executor and liberal political philosopher, J.N. Figgis (1866–1919). Stephen Taylor, Hannah Smith and I are also engaged in producing a scholarly edition of the memoirs and correspondence of the Whig politician John Lord Hervey (1696–1743) which will be published by Oxford University Press, while I am doing a scholarly edition of Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers for the Liberty Fund’s Thomas Hollis Library project. With James Vaughn, I am also editing one on Liberal Democracy and the Age of Revolution.