Rate My Professor Jon Parkin

Jon Parkin is Professor and Tutorial Fellow in History at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, and Associate Professor of History in the Faculty of History. He earned an MA in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1991 and a PhD in Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge in 1995. His career trajectory includes serving as Centenary Research Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge from 1995 to 1998, and British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History Department at King’s College London from 1998 to 1999. From 1999 to 2012, he was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York, where he also directed the Morrell Toleration Programme. In 2012, he returned to Oxford as Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at St Hugh’s College. He has received the University of Oxford’s Recognition of Distinction award, conferring the title of Professor.

Parkin’s research centers on the interplay between intellectual ideas and practical politics in the Early Enlightenment, particularly the reception and adaptation of Thomas Hobbes’s political and religious ideas in England between 1640 and 1700. His influential monographs include Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England (Boydell & Brewer, 1999), which examines Richard Cumberland’s contributions, and Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of Thomas Hobbes’s Political and Religious Ideas in England 1640-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He co-edited Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (British Academy, 2013) and edited Richard Cumberland’s A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (Liberty Fund, 2005). Parkin has published extensively on Hobbism, self-censorship, Latitudinarianism, toleration, and methodological approaches to the history of political thought, with articles in journals such as Historical Journal, Political Studies, and History of Political Thought, and chapters in volumes like The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes (2016). His work traces how abstract theories shaped political, religious, and cultural debates, encompassing European natural law theory and figures from Quentin Skinner to John Pocock. He serves on the committee of the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History and supervises DPhil students in early modern intellectual history and the history of political thought.