Suffering a Sea Change? Early Modern Religion and Seafaring

Dr Andrii Pastushenko

Dr Andrii Pastushenko is a Researcher-at-Risk Fellow of the British Academy, an academic visitor at All Souls College, and an associate member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He also serves as Associate Professor in the Department of International Economic Relations and Business Security at Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics, Ukraine. Over nearly a decade of teaching in higher education, Dr Pastushenko has delivered a wide range of courses, including specialised courses such as Origins of the Early Modern Global Economy and Europeans and the Sea in the Early Modern Period.

Dr Pastushenko’s research centres on the maritime history of Elizabethan England, with a particular focus on the Catholic identity of Elizabethan seafarers within the context of the long Reformation at sea. His work explores the presence of Catholic sailors on Protestant English ships, on Spanish vessels, and within clandestine Catholic networks of resistance. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Catholicism and Elizabethan Seafaring: Catholic Identities between England and Spain, based on extensive research in British and Spanish archives.

Dr Richard Blakemore

Associate Professor at Dept of History, University of Reading

My research focuses on the history of human society and the sea, particularly during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. My main current interest is the social history of seafarers. As sailors travelled ever further and more frequently during the early modern period, building and maintaining commercial networks and contacts across cultures, they brought home new wealth, objects and ideas. They also contributed to the emergence of new social, economic, political, and legal situations in Britain, Europe, and around the globe. My present research considers the experiences of seafarers across this period, their perceptions of the maritime environment, their professional culture, their relationships with communities ashore, and their role within empire and other political and legal regimes. I also have broader research interests in the development of maritime communities, global and maritime trade and warfare, cultural interactions with the sea, maritime law, and the history and popular perceptions of piracy.

Dr David Harrap

Teaching Fellow at School of History, Queen Mary University of London