History

Senior Lecturer

Office: 414, 26 Gordon Square
Office hour: Wednesday 12-1
External phone: 020 7679 3630
Internal phone: 33630
E-mail: j.peacey@ucl.ac.uk

My area of interest is British history in the early modern period. I teach ‘Tudor and Stuart Britain, 1500-1700’, 'The Political City: London in the Seventeenth Century' and 'Popular Politics in Early Modern Britain', as well as an MA course entitled 'The Public Sphere in Britain, 1476-1776'. I also convene, and teach on ‘Concepts, categories and the practice of history’.

My research focuses on the politics and political culture of early modern Britain, and I am particularly interested in the relationship between print culture and political life. I am interested, therefore, in the censorship and exploitation of the press by the political elite, the ways in which contemporaries experienced the early modern 'information revolution'. I am currently completing a book which will assess how members of the public reacted to propaganda and newspapers as readers and consumers, and appropriated print in order to participate in national political life. I am also developing a new project relating to the political culture of print and diplomacy in seventeenth century Europe, which will explore the possibilities for books and newspapers to traverse national borders, and the constraints placed upon such flows of print, not least through diplomatic means. I am also on of the editors of a Leverhulme funded project to produce a new edition of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell.

Beyond this, I serve on the editorial boards of History Compass, Media History, and Parliamentary History, for the latter of which I also serve as a book reviews editor. I am also one of the editors of a monograph series for Pickering and Chatto, entitled 'Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period'.

Areas of Research Supervision: I am interested in supervising topics relating to the early modern period of British History, especially those concerning political history and political culture. I have a particular interest in parliamentary history, popular politics, print culture, and the history of communication, including the history of journalism, reading and the 'reception' of texts.

Current research students: Keith Stapylton: Parliamentary privilege and immunity from arrest in early Stuart England

Recent Publications include:

- 'Radicalism relocated: royalist pamphleteering in the late 1640s', in A Hessayon and D. Finnegan, eds, Varieties of Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century English Radicalism in Context (2011)

- 'Pamphlets', in J. Raymond, ed. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture to 1660 (2011)

- 'The good old cause for which I suffer: the life of a regicide in exile', in P. Major and L. Jardine, eds. Literature of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath (2010)

-'Perceptions of Parliament: factions and the public' in J. Adamson, ed., The Civil Wars: Rebellion and Revolution in the Kingdom of Charles I (2009)

- '"Fit for public services": the upbringing of Richard Cromwell', in P. Little, ed. Oliver Cromwell (2009)

- '"The counterfeit silly curr": money, politics and the forging of royalist newspapers in the English civil war', Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (1) (2004) 27 - 57
- ‘Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth-Century England’, History Compass, 2007
- ‘The Protector humbled: Richard Cromwell and the constitution’, in P. Little, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate, 1653-9 (2007)
- The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600-1800 (ed.) 2007
- ‘Sir Thomas Cotton’s Consumption of News in 1650s England’, The Library (2006)
- ‘Cromwellian England: a propaganda state?’, History, 2006
- ‘The hunting of the Leveller: the sophistication of parliamentarian propaganda, 1647-53’, Historical Research, 2005
- ‘The struggle for Mercurius Britanicus: factional politics and the parliamentarian press, 1643- 6’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2005
- Politicians and Pamphleteers. Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 2004
- Parliament at Work (ed. with Chris Kyle), 2002
- The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, (ed.), 2001

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